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Mind
Power News Zen
is Boring By
Brad Warner, Author of
Let's face it. Zen is boring. You couldn't find a duller, more tedious practice than Zazen. The philosophy is dry and unexciting. It's amazing to me anyone reads this page at all. Don't you people know you could be playing Tetris, right now? That there are a million free porno sites out there? Get a life, why don't you?!
Joshu Sasaki, a Zen teacher from the Rinzai Sect, once said that Buddhist teachers always try to make students long for the Buddha World, but that if the students knew how really dry and tasteless the Buddha World actually was, they'd never want to go. He's right. Look at Zen teachers. Not a one of them has any sense of fashion. They sit around staring at blank walls. Ask them about levitation, they won't tell you. Ask them about life after death, they change the subject. Ask them about miracles and they start spouting nonsense about carrying buckets of water and chopping up fire wood. They go to bed early and wake up early. Zen is a philosophy for nerds. What
the Maharishi Gave Science As biographer Bob Spitz recounted in his 2005 book “The Beatles,” the three retreated from the meditation sessions they had signed on for and instead spent their time writing dozens of songs. (Ringo Starr left after a week, saying he couldn’t stomach the spicy Indian food.) Many of those songs made it onto the White Album. The other legacy the Maharishi, who died on Tuesday, gave the West is more controversial. In 1971 he founded Maharishi International University, in Iowa (now called Maharishi University of Management), which has become the center for studies of Transcendental Meditation (TM). Almost immediately—research papers on the benefits of TM appeared as early as 1974—scientists there began researching how TM affects everything from job satisfaction to blood pressure to anxiety. There was just one problem. “Those early studies were extremely tendentious and just not of high caliber scientifically,” B. Alan Wallace, president of the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies, told me last fall. In the early days, many studies compared people who meditate to those who do not. That made some of their conclusions suspect: if meditators have lower levels of stress than non-meditators, as studies found, that might be because only already-mellow people choose to meditate and stick with it, not because of the practice itself. Still, it would be churlish to deny the numerous studies reporting benefits from TM. One found that learning TM reduced hypertension in older African-American men. Others reported that meditation can moderate the harmful effects of strenuous physical exercise on the immune system, that it can produce a feeling of euphoria akin to “runner’s high”, and that it reduced anxiety more than other relaxation techniques. Maharishi University regularly updates the list of research results. But scientists are not fully convinced. It has been difficult to rule out an alternative explanation for apparent benefits such as reductions in stress, blood pressure and heart rate—namely, the placebo effect. If you expect an intervention, be it a pill or learning TM, to help you, it often does. If you are testing the benefits of a pill, you can give half your study subjects a dummy pill but not tell them, which can help control for the placebo effect. It’s pretty hard to hide from test subjects the fact that they are learning to meditate and then doing so for several hours a week. Perhaps it is the belief that TM will do wonderful things that produces benefits, not the actual meditation. That question remains very much up in the air. Despite these concerns, the Maharishi and his American acolytes deserve credit for introducing the study of meditation to biology. Hospitals from Stanford and UCLA to Duke and NYU have instituted meditation programs to help patients cope with chronic pain and other ailments. Scientists unaffiliated with the TM movement have been emboldened to study the effects of other forms of meditation on diseases as different as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and psoriasis, all with impressive results. Whatever you think of the White Album, give the Maharishi credit for helping to launch what has become a legitimate new field of neuroscience. RELATED ARTICLE: The Maharishi Effect Is
Negative Publicity Helping Scientology? Scientology has taken a battering in the early month's of 2008, with a video of prominent Scientologist Tom Cruise appearing on YouTube showing the actor ranting about the power of the Church and its vast reach. During the video, Cruise appears to rant uncontrollably in "Scientology-speak", including an outburst about the damage Psychiatrists are doing to mental health patients. The Cruise video was watched millions of times before being pulled from the site, amid accusations the Church had pressured Google (the owners of YouTube) to delete the video. An online hacker group known as Anonymous has also pledged to take down the Church of Scientology, including the removal of their websites and online infrastructure. Despite this the Church said overnight that the negative coverage had been contributing to high levels of user interest in the organisation, and had assisted in its recruiment drive. The False Guru Test Source: EnergyGrid.com
Take the EnergyGrid False Guru Test. If
seven or more of the following describes
your guru or spiritual teacher, then unfortunately
he or she may not be be as enlightened or
good for your soul as you would like to
believe: The
World's First Happiness Map
The 20 happiest nations in the World are: 1 - Denmark; 2 - Switzerland; 3 - Austria; 4 - Iceland; 5 - The Bahamas; 6 - Finland; 7 - Sweden; 8 - Bhutan; 9 - Brunei; 10 - Canada; 11 - Ireland; 12 - Luxembourg; 13 - Costa Rica; 14 - Malta; 15 - The Netherlands; 16 - Antigua and Barbuda; 17 - Malaysia; 18 - New Zealand; 19 - Norway; 20 - The Seychelles What
I Learned
from Atheists
By Karl Moore, CEO of Self Help Street Sometimes, I admit, I lose faith. I lose faith in goodness. I lose faith in humanity. I lose faith in God. Sometimes, maybe, you do too. As many of you know, I love discussing the exploration of space. To gain a perspective of where you are in the universe right now, just try watching the "zoom out" introduction to Contact. But once you get beyond our current galaxy, you tend to disappear. You're lost in a silent world. A world of planets. Of mass objects obeying the laws of the universe. No emotion. No human feeling. No love. And, quite possibly, no God. As you keep going deeper and deeper and deeper, further and further away - billions of light years from earth, where mega-clusters of sub-universes tangle together like DNA strings... where the tiniest pixel on an image would represent infinite numbers of galaxies and worlds and beings and planets... Where size, as humans imagine it, really ceases to mean anything. When you're out there... looking in... seeing the crazy things that humans do, on their tiny little planet. When you're out there... in the silence, in the non-human world, devoid of contact, devoid of true life. You might... you just might... lose faith. More
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