bodhi tree swaying

I enjoyed the article in Psychology Today that this extract is taken from.

What do you do every day… maybe many times a day? Open the door of your car? Wash your hands? Turn on your computer? There are a million of them. If you choose even one of those rote, means-to-an-end kind of things and decide to attach an altogether different meaning to it, it will become the repetition that you already do, in service of your own private meditative practice. And you’ll be doing it many times a day. And without having to push away your busy world. And while you are doing something you had to do anyway.What is it you would like to meditate on?

And how would you like to meditate? Whatever form you know or create can be put into a “to go” version. My mantra? I’ll say it once every time I open my

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Daniel Gilbert in the NYT, reviewing BEING WRONG: Adventures in the Margin of Error, by Kathryn Schulz

In 1650, Oliver Cromwell asked the Church of Scotland to reconsider its decision to side with the royalists instead of him. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” The church didn’t think it possible, of course, so Oliver’s army took Scotland.

According to Kathryn Schulz, each of us is our very own Church of Scotland — ­often mistaken, oddly oblivious and typically immune to a good beseeching. ­“Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” is an insightful and delightful discussion of the errors of our ways — why we make mistakes, why we don’t know we are making them and what we do when recognition dawns.

Schulz begins with a question that should puzzle

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David Brooks of the New York Times is on a roll. He has an interesting article today giving a quick overview of some recent research on morality.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.

Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.

This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the

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I’ve long advocated the usefulness of “creative daydreaming.” In fact I wrote a piece on Wildmind several years ago that touched on the subject, which I suspects is a bit taboo with some meditation teachers who are stuck with the idea that we should let go of all thinking.

Anyway, there was an interesting article recently in the New York Times, called Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind, confirming the notion that daydreaming can be a creative act. Fortunately research is being done on the topic, and there are some interesting results:

During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time…

From one third to three quarters of our time being …

A recent discussion on the mechanisms by which the Medicine Buddha mantra might actually promote health reminded me of an article I read a few years ago in New Scientist, comparing the effects of “spiritual meditation” and “secular meditation.” Here’s an extract:

College students who volunteered for the study were randomly assigned to one of three groups regardless of their spiritual beliefs. The 25 students in the spiritual meditation group were told to concentrate on a phrase such as “God is love” or “God is peace” during their meditation periods. Those in the secular meditation group used a phrase such as “I am happy” or “I am joyful” while the third group were simply told to relax.

Subjects were asked to practise their technique for 20 minutes each day for two weeks, at the beginning and end of which the researchers

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A key Buddhist teaching is a list of five reflections that the Buddha said everyone should contemplate daily. The reflections are:

1. I am subject to old age.
2. I am subject to sickness
3. I am subject to death.
4. I will be separated from all that is dear to me.
5 I am responsible for my own actions and destiny.

Basically it’s saying: life is short, make the most of it, take responsibility for yourself.

And I just came across a nice piece of research showing that your attitude to time affects your ability to fully appreciate the present moment.

This is from an article in Science Daily, last year:

Psychologist Jaime L. Kurtz from Pomona College investigated how our behavior and attitude towards an activity change when there is a limited amount of time remaining to engage in it. A group of college

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Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

It’s a simple bookmark that you put on your browser toolbar and then click when you want to simplify a web page. On a blog it removes all the sidebars and ads, allowing you to focus on the main content. On a regular site it can be useful for reformatting the font and column width. Here’s an example:

“Before”

Note the excessively wide “column.” Actually, the text runs right across the page width, meaning that your eyes have to work very hard to scan across the width of the text.

“After”

See how much easier it would be to read the text in a proper column?

Here’s another “before.” …

10.01.10 is the date (US-style) of when my book, Living As a River, is published by Sounds True. The date has a rather symmetrical loveliness.

I just got the MS back from my editor today, along with her suggested changes and with some lovely comments.

She said: “I have totally fallen in love with this book.”

She also said: “It has opened my heart and mind up in countless ways.”

These are nice things to hear.

I’ve been reading a little about the Stoics recently. They were a Greek/Roman school of philosophers who started about 300 BCE and who continued teaching until 529 CE, when the Christian emperor Justinian I banned pagan philosophies.

There are a lot of similarities between Stoicism and Buddhism. Here are two quotes that parallel each other very closely.

“…as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person’s own life.”
– Epictetus

“Irrigators guide water; fletchers shape arrows; carpenters bend wood; the wise control themselves.”
– The Buddha

At the source, at the very source are live streams.
Through my body trickles air like birch sap.
And the buzz of bees, the midsummer sun
Ripple inside me and ripple above.

At the source—living streams…
I won’t ask where they flow.
Only blend into the floating shadow of a tree,
wrap myself in a bird’s tremulous melody.

At the very source is a glow.
I don’t ask whither flows the stream.
At the deepest source is a glow.
Through me ripple grasses and the sky,
Birch trees and the midsummer sun.
What am I in this eternal flow?

From “Intermezzo,” by Janina Degutytė, translated by Gražina M. Slavėnas

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. Then, go out and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Harold Whitman, cited in Ben-shahar (2007)

Welcome to the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View. All today I’ll be online, doing various things connected with the book and its subject. Do feel free to drop in and say “hi” or “congratulations” or anything else you feel inspired to utter (using the comment form, naturally; you can talk to your computer if you want but I probably won’t hear you!).

As well as the welcome video I’ll be adding new material to the blog all day, and I’ll add links on this post. So this is the “home page” for the party, with different “rooms” where you can mingle.

First you have to dodge the author touting his wares in the hall and spouting his opinions:

• Here’s a list of places

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This post is connected with the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View.

In my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View, I argue that although the Buddha ate meat, that was because he lived by begging for food. Those of us who shop for food are in a different situation and we should follow his advice “not to kill, or cause to kill, or to approve of others killing.” In other words, to live a compassionate life, don’t eat meat.

A nice little trailer pointing out some of the carbon-related benefits of reducing or eliminating meat from our diet. This is one of the posts that’s part of my book launch party.

…here she explains why.

This post is part of my book launch party.

You can buy my book. Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View at any of the following places:

• Amazon.com in the US
• Consortium Books in the US
• Amazon.ca in Canada
• Windhorse Publications in the UK
• Amazon.co.uk in the UK

Amazon.com and Consortium’s sites are saying that the book’s not yet available, but I’m told it should actually be in stock. In any event, I’d really love it if you bought the book. If you buy the book today on Amazon it will create a nice little blip in sales which will help to get it a bit more attention. Maybe we could make it into Amazon’s list of best-selling Buddhist books?

Another HuffPo article, this time a review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals:

Making a different choice for dinner is the most powerful individual thing we can do to reduce global warming, as Foer points out. How big a sacrifice is that? To just reduce what we are consuming, say by going meatless one night a week as a starter? Remember our grandparents’ dinners. Meat was a special once-a-week treat, for economic reasons and availability reasons. Today we are going in the opposite direction eating it sometimes three times a day, at breakfast, lunch and dinner. The more we eat, the more factory farms have to produce, the further we get from core values of stewardship and morale responsibility.

How we treat our chickens, pigs, fish and cows affects everyone. Whether you eat animals or not, they have an impact on your life in the pollution they create, and

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Jonathan Safran Foer has a piece in HuffPo on vegetarianism. The guy’s everywhere these days, and you might think it was his book launch I was pimping and not my own! (The launch of the second edition of “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View” is this Friday, November 13. And you’re invited to my online launch party.)

Here’s an extract:

Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish my mom’s Volvo’s bumper, a bake sale cause to fill the self-conscious half hour of school break, an occasion to get closer

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The launch of the second edition of “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View” is on Friday, November 13 (by the way, you’re invited to my online launch party).

From the Guardian, a couple of days ago.

Eating meat could become as socially unacceptable as drink-driving because of the impact it has on global warming, according to a senior authority on climate change.

Lord Stern of Brentford, former adviser to the government on the economics of climate change, said people will have to consider turning vegetarian to help reduce global carbon emissions.

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better,” Stern said.

Farmed ruminant animals, including cattle and sheep, are thought to be responsible for up to a quarter of “man-made” methane emissions worldwide.

Stern, whose 2006 Stern Review

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