Another interesting article, this time from the Daily Princetonian.

Professor Davidson has an impressive record of research into the effects on the brain of practicing meditation. If you haven’t read Daniel Goleman’s “Destructive Emotions” then I’d highly recommend it. The book is more positive than the title suggests!

“Happiness can be conceptualized as a skill, not fundamentally different from learning to play the violin or learning to play golf,” University of Wisconsin psychology professor Richard Davidson said, describing his research into whether meditation and other contemplative practices can cultivate positive states of mind.

Examining brain images of subjects during meditative exercises has shown that “even relatively short-term strategies to train the mind in this way can produce beneficial effects that are observed in the brain,” Davidson explained. “It seems like certain positive qualities of the mind, like happiness and compassion, may be benefited by training.”

You can read the full article online.

Interesting, although brief, article in the NYT (who require free registration):

Meditation is often credited with helping people feel more focused and energetic, but are the benefits measurable?

A new study suggests that they are. When researchers tested the alertness of volunteers, they found that the practice proved more effective than naps, exercise or caffeine. The results were presented at a recent conference of the Society for Neuroscience.

The researchers, led by Prashant Kaul of the University of Kentucky, took 12 students who did not meditate and taught them the basics in two short sessions…

Terra Linda High School in San Rafael, California, has reportedly lost a grant that was to fund a high school meditation club. A number of parents had objected to the teaching of Transcendental Meditation to students on the grounds that TM is a cult. Attendance at the school club would have been optional, the club would not have been part of the school curriculum, and the club would have met in students’ free time. Despite this, the article cited above reports that a conservative legal organization was considering suing the school for violating the separation of church and state.

As I commented earlier, there seem to be few legal grounds for preventing such a club. Other religious traditions have clubs meeting in the high school, and as long as the TM club is not a part of the curriculum there is no case for arguing that church and state are not being kept in appropriate arms-length relationship. While I agree that the TM movement does seem to be very cultish, I’m not aware of any legal way to discriminate against one religious tradition, unless there are genuine concerns for the safety of young people, which I think it would be difficult to argue in this case given that school staff would also be involved in the program.

My main concern is that more genuinely secular forms of meditation, such as Buddhist mindfulness meditation, may also be kept out of schools because of prejudice against non-Christian religions. The Watchman Fellowship website describes the presence of even secularized meditation practices in schools as “an intrusion” and calls for the government “to come up with a more comprehensive definition of ‘religion’ and a tighter regulation of New Age practices within the public schools.”

This blog started off as just a part of my personal website, but the blogging software is so useful that I’m in the process of moving all the content from the old, static pages here. You’ll notice in the sidebar a bunch of new links to publications, including extracts from my book, “Living a Buddhist Life: Vegetarianism.” I’m not quite done moving stuff yet, but I should be finished by the start of next week.

I founded Wildmind in 2000, and it’s been evolving continuously since then. The website has grown, we now have translations into Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian, and Polish, we offer a growing range of online courses, we do prison work, we have a team of 3.5 workers, we’ve published several CDs, and we’ve set up an online retail store.

We’ve been doubling in size (as measured by our economic activity) every year for five years, but growth has become a bit of an end in itself and I’ve been increasingly unhappy with the work I’ve been doing. I started Wildmind because I had a passion for teaching and writing, but the organization has grown so much that I’ve basically become an administrator and haven’t had time to write or teach.

So, I’m making some major changes at Wildmind. The changes are mainly internal and will bring about some benefits to me, although they won’t affect public much; the various websites will still be there and we’ll offer even more online courses.

I’m slimming things down, changing our legal structure, cutting out the retail sales and having a smaller team, and getting rid of our expensive office. The net effect will be that it’ll just be me, Sunada, and my part-time webmaster, all working from home. I’ll have more time to write. In fact I already do and I’ve been writing more material for the website, as you’ll see from posts below, and from the increased amount of writing I’m doing on this blog.

The changes aren’t yet complete. We’ve already cut out most of our retail sales, and we may stick just at the current MP3 and meditation CD sales. We sold off part of our retail activities to a friend, which gives us more money for doing good things. My office manager is now working just part-time, and plans to go back to college. He’ll probably be gone in another month or two (I’ll miss him!) We should be able to leave our current office by the end of the year, and thereafter my duties will be simpler and I’ll have more time for practice, teaching, and writing, which form a kind of holy trinity for me! (This is just until the spring, of course, when fatherhood will hit me like a ton of very welcome bricks).

I’m excited about these changes in the business.

“Mindful Eating” is becoming a popular subject these days, what with mindfulness practice diffusing into western culture and with westerners (and especially Americans) becoming increasingly overweight. A new book, “Mindless Eating,” explores the flip-side of mindful eating — why and how we eat without awareness even of how much we’re consuming.

The book hasn’t yet been published, but there was a fascinating article in the New York Times the other day — Seduced by Snacks? No, Not You (the NYT requires free registration) — about the author, Brian Wansink, Ph.D., and his work. Judging by the article the book will be a good read.

The last we’d heard from our adoption agency, our planned adoption of an orphan from Ethiopia was going to take considerably longer than originally forecast. We now think that their outlook was pessimistic.

My wife has been keeping an eye on how long it’s been taking couples who contribute to the Wide Horizons for Children Yahoo Group to get ther referrals, and at the moment the time between submission of the dossier to Ethiopia and being referred a child is holding steady at seven to seven and a half months. That would put us on track for getting our referral around March, which is only a couple of months later than originally forecast. If the seven to seven and a half months pattern keeps up, we should be travelling to Ethiopia around May next year.

We’ve been busy over at Wildmind, transferring our archive of around 1000 news stories about meditation to a new section based on blogging software.

The advantages of the new section are that it’s searchable and that the stories can be browsed by category. Actually, it’s going to take us a while to go back through the archive and categorize each post, but it’s already a tremendous resource, especially if you want to search for, say “Jewish meditation” or find stories related to meditation and children. Check it out.

Further reports (Marin IJ and NBC) have clarified that the Transcendental Meditation program is being offered through a school club and not as part of the curriculum. In that case I have fewer reservations than I expressed earlier.

Religious activity as part of school clubs rather than as part of the curriculum is a normal part of school life.

Sure, the TM organization has every appearance of being a cult designed to make large amounts of money. And sure, the representatives of the organization misled parents at the school meeting by implying they have no connection with Hinduism, but many other religions are involved in school clubs and even mainstream religions such as Catholicism can have strong cultish elements, and I can’t imagine that a school (or its parents) would get away with banning a Catholic students club because, for example, the church has a history of covering up child sexual abuse or because its leader makes inflammatory statements about other religions.

Heck, even Buddhist organizations can act like cults. So can secular organizations. Cultish behavior (obediance to authority, the needs of the organization outweighing the needs of individuals, criticism of out-groups, the process of “group-think” where people accept things as true without thinking them through) is just part of the way human beings are when they get together in groups.

It would be problematic for a school to allow the formation of clubs by some religions and not others. Who makes the value judgements about whether some religions are suitable for school clubs and not others? If there’s a safety issue (for example if a religion was promoting violence against other students) then there would be a clear-cut case for denying access to schools. But to argue that a particular religious tradition is a “cult” doesn’t really say anything more than saying “it’s not the same cult I belong to.”

I’m glad that some of the parents at Terra Linda High School are concerned about the possible impact on the welfare of their children if they attend classes run by the TM people, but the best thing they can do is simply to prevent their children from attending.

It’s well worth checking out the FWBO News 2.0 website. Set up and maintained by Jayarava, it’s an important place to visit for anyone involved in the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, and an interesting read for anyone else interested in Buddhist practice. At the moment there’s an unusually high number of stories from India, where mass conversions to Buddhism are under way.

Another attempt is being made to bring Transcendental Meditation, or TM, into American schools, this time in California. Some San Rafael parents are concerned about the importation of a religious practice into the supposedly secular school system. “Principal Carole Ramsey said the proposed program would not have any religious or spiritual elements,” according to The San Jose Mercury News.

TM without religious elements would be a contradiction in terms, given that the practice involves reciting mantras that are the names of Hindu deities! It would be hard to argue that getting a bunch of kids in school to sit with their eyes closed, silently repeating the name of Jesus, was not a religious activity.

Moreover, TM has already been found to be a religion. In 1977, Transcendental Meditation was ruled a religion by the United States District Court, District of New Jersey, in the case of Malnak v. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

I’ve taught meditation in schools myself, but I’ve always been careful to teach only mindfulness and lovingkindness meditations, which are practices that have no religious underpinnings and which are, in effect, secular forms of mental training.

It’s clear that the TM movement has tried to present itself (with some success, apparently) as a nonreligious movement in order to get access to public funds to help them disseminate their teachings. Let’s keep religious instruction out of US schools!

I was pleased to see a reference to my book on Buddhism and vegetarianism in this article in Wikipedia. I don’t think it’s a particularly good article, and you’d be better reading my book for a fuller and more balanced account.

Wikipedia at its best is excellent, and it often is excellent. At worst it can be highly misleading. The trouble is you can’t necessarily tell whether a particular piece of information is accurate or not unless you know the subject. John Seigenthaler found out the hard way that anyone can write anything on Wikipedia.

I had a minor surgical procedure yesterday to correct an abnormality in my esophagus. Everything went well and I’m feeling good today, but I decided to take the day off work to be kind to myself. Of course how better could I spent my time away from the office than doing some writing? Since I’ve been expanding the section on Wildmind on mantras, I thought it would be a good idea to say something about what a Bodhisattva is.

I was very surprised, after adding a section on mantras to Wildmind a couple of years back, to find that it quickly became the most visited part of the site. As far as I can recall, the Om shanti shanti shanti page is the busiest, with Avalokiteshvara and Gree Tara coming in second and third place.

It’s overdue, but I’ve been fleshing out that section of the site, which has been, I confess, rather thin on substance. I started by writing pages on the Three Family Protectors — Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri, and Vajrapani — and then added a page on Shakyamuni. Well, I meant to add a page on Shakyamuni but, well, what with him being the Buddha and all I found that the page rapidly became too big and so I split it into several pages covering his life story, iconography, and mudras. I ended up calling that a “special section,” which acts as a kind of appendage to the mantra section.

Today I worked on a page on Green Tara, which is online although I suspect I’ll be adding more shortly. I also expanded the entry on Om shanti shanti shanti.

I’ve been adding some diacritics to the mantra section as well. This is a bit of a risk, because some of the diacritics may not show up on some computers that lack the requisite fonts. Also, there are different conventions for representing diacritics: you can simply ignore them (which most people do) so that you have, for example, “Tara.” Then there are conventions for representing diacritics, so that “Tara” becomes “Taaraa” (the doubled A’s representing long A’s, or A’s with a macron, or bar, over them). Then of course there’s the option of putting in the diacritics — as in “Tārā” — running the risk of illegibility. So I’ve put two versions of each mantra, one with the full diacritics and the other with none, meaning that at lleast one will be legible.