The Wisdom of Ram Dass Is Now Online: Stream 150 of His Enlightened Spiritual Talks as Free Podcasts

in Podcasts, Religion | September 4th, 2019

Image by Barabeke, via Cre­ative Com­mons

“Over the course of his life, it would appear that Ram Dass has led two vast­ly dif­fer­ent lives,” writes Katie Ser­e­na in an All That’s Inter­est­ing pro­file of the man for­mer­ly known as Richard Alpert. By embody­ing two dis­tinct, but equal­ly influ­en­tial, beings in one life­time, he has also embod­ied the fusion, and divi­sion, of two sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al inher­i­tances from the 60s: the psy­che­del­ic drug cul­ture and the hip­pie syn­cretism of East­ern reli­gion Chris­tian­i­ty, Yoga, etc.

These strains did not always come togeth­er in the health­i­est of ways. But Ram Dass is a unique indi­vid­ual. As Alpert, the Mass­a­chu­setts-born Har­vard psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor, he began con­trolled exper­i­ments with LSD at Har­vard with Tim­o­thy Leary.

When both were dis­missed, they con­tin­ued their famous ses­sions in Mill­brook, New York, from 1963 to 1967, in essence cre­at­ing the lab­o­ra­to­ry con­di­tions for the coun­ter­cul­ture, in research that has since been val­i­dat­ed once again as hold­ing keys that might unlock depres­sion, anx­i­ety, and addic­tion.

Then, Alpert trav­elled to India in 1967 with a friend who called him­self “Bha­ga­van Das,” begin­ning an epic spir­i­tu­al jour­ney that rivals the leg­ends of the Bud­dha, as he describes it in the trail­er below for the new doc­u­men­tary Becom­ing Nobody. He trans­formed from the infa­mous Richard Alpert to the soon-to-be-world-famous Ram Dass (which means “ser­vant of god”), a guide for West­ern seek­ers who encour­ages peo­ple not to leave it all behind and do as he did, but to find their path in the mid­dle of what­ev­er lives they hap­pen to be liv­ing.

“I think that the spir­i­tu­al trip in this moment,” he said in one of his hun­dreds of talks, “is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a cave in the Himalayas, but it’s in rela­tion to the tech­nol­o­gy that’s exist­ing, it’s in rela­tion to where we’re at.” It might sound like a friend­ly mes­sage to the sta­tus quo. But Ram Dass is a true sub­ver­sive, who asked us, through all of the reli­gious, aca­d­e­m­ic, and psy­che­del­ic trap­pings he picked up, put down, and picked up again at var­i­ous times, to take a good hard look at who we’re try­ing to be and why.

Ram Dass’ moment has come again, “as the par­al­lels between today’s fraught polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment and that of the Viet­nam era mul­ti­ply,” writes Will Welch at GQ. “Yoga, organ­ic foods, the Grate­ful Dead,” and psychedelics—“all of them are back in fash­ion,” and so are Ram Dass’ talks about how we might find clar­i­ty, authen­tic­i­ty, and con­nec­tion in a dis­tract­ed, tech­no­crat­ic, polar­iz­ing, pow­er- and per­son­al­i­ty-mad soci­ety.

There are 150 of those talks now on the pod­cast Ram Dass Here and Now, with intro­duc­tions from Raghu Markus of Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remem­ber Foun­da­tion. You can stream or down­load them at Apple Pod­casts or at the Be Here Now Net­work, named for the teacher’s rad­i­cal 1971 book that gave the coun­ter­cul­ture its mantra. Ram Dass is still teach­ing, over fifty years after his trans­for­ma­tion from acid guru to… well, actu­al guru.

In a recent inter­view with The New York Times, he described “nos­tal­gia for the ‘60s and ‘70s” as a younger gen­er­a­tion show­ing “they’re tired of our cul­ture. They’re inter­est­ed in cul­ti­vat­ing their minds and their soul.” How do we do that? The jour­ney does resem­ble his in one way, he says. If we want to change the cul­ture, we first have to change our­selves. Fig­ure out who we’ve been pre­tend­ing to be, then drop the act. “Once you have become some­body,” he says in the talk fur­ther up from 1976, “then you are ready to start the jour­ney to becom­ing nobody.”

Learn much more about Ram Dass’ jour­ney and hear many more of his inspir­ing talks at the Be Here Now Net­work.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

The His­toric LSD Debate at MIT: Tim­o­thy Leary v. Pro­fes­sor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Meditation for Beginners: Buddhist Monks & Teachers Explain the Basics

in Health, Psychology, Religion | September 3rd, 2019

In the app-rich, nuance-starved cul­ture of late cap­i­tal­ism, we are encour­aged to con­flate two vast­ly dif­fer­ent con­cepts: the sim­ple and the easy. Maybe no bet­ter exam­ple exists than in the mar­ket­ing of meditation—the sell­ing of an activ­i­ty that, in essence, requires no spe­cial­ized equip­ment or infra­struc­ture. What medi­a­tion does require is a good instruc­tor and encour­age­ment. It is sim­ple. But it is not easy. It’s true, you’ll hear teach­ers rue­ful­ly admit, they don’t print this on the brochures for retreat cen­ters: but sus­tained med­i­ta­tion can be dif­fi­cult and painful just as well as it can induce seren­i­ty, peace, and joy. When we sit down to med­i­tate, we “feel our stuff,” to para­phrase David Byrne.

Next to the host of phys­i­cal com­plaints and exter­nal stres­sors clam­or­ing for atten­tion, if we’ve got per­son­al bad vibra­tions to con­tend with, they will ham­per our abil­i­ty to accept the present and relax. This is why, his­tor­i­cal­ly, those wish­ing to embark on the Bud­dhist path would first take eth­i­cal pre­cepts, and prac­tice them, before begin­ning to med­i­tate, under the pre­sump­tion that doing good (or non-harm) qui­ets the mind. “It is true that med­i­ta­tion is impor­tant in the Bud­dhist tra­di­tion,” writes Tibetan teacher Yongey Mingyur Rin­poche at Lion’s Roar. “But in many ways, ethics and virtue are the foun­da­tion of the Bud­dhist path.”

Of course, there are non-Bud­dhist med­i­ta­tion tra­di­tions. And the mind­ful­ness move­ment has demon­strat­ed with great suc­cess that one can carve most of the reli­gion away from med­i­ta­tion and still derive many short-term ben­e­fits from the prac­tice. But to do so is to dis­pense with thou­sands of years of expe­ri­en­tial wis­dom, not only about the dif­fi­cul­ties of sus­tain­ing a med­i­ta­tion prac­tice over the long term, but also about med­i­ta­tion’s inher­ent simplicity—something those of us inclined to over­com­pli­cate things may need to hear over and over again.

Tibetan teach­ers like Mingyur (and teach­ers from every Bud­dhist lin­eage) are gen­er­al­ly hap­py to expound upon the sim­plic­i­ty and joy of medi­a­tion, with the good nature we might expect of those who spend their lives let­ting go of regrets and fears. Some­times their mes­sages are pack­aged for eas­i­er con­sump­tion, which is a fine way to get a taste of some­thing before you decide to explore it fur­ther. But the point remains, as Mingyur says in the video at the top from The Jakar­ta Poet, that “med­i­ta­tion is com­plete­ly nat­ur­al.” It is not a prod­uct and does­n’t require any acces­sories or sub­scrip­tions.

It is also not an altered state of con­scious­ness or a nihilist escape. It is allow­ing our­selves to expe­ri­ence what is hap­pen­ing inside and all around us moment by moment by tun­ing into our aware­ness. We can do this any­where, at any time, for any length of time, as the monk fur­ther up tells us. “Even three sec­onds, two sec­onds, while you’re walk­ing, while you’re hav­ing cof­fee and tea, while you’re hav­ing a meet­ing… you can med­i­tate.” Real­ly? Yes, since med­i­ta­tion is not a vaca­tion from your life but an inten­si­fied expe­ri­enc­ing of it (even the meet­ings).

We get a celebri­ty endorse­ment above from the man who plays the angri­est man on tele­vi­sion, Gor­don Ram­say. The chef takes a break from his abu­sive kitchen rages to meet with a Thai monk, who says of his deci­sion to enter the monastery, “I’ve been to many dif­fer­ent places, I’d trav­eled around, but the one place I hadn’t looked at was my mind.” West­ern­ers may hear this and think of far out states—and there are plen­ty of those to be found in Bud­dhist texts, but not much talk of them among Bud­dhist teach­ers. Gen­er­al­ly, the word “mind” has a far more expan­sive range here than the fir­ing of synaps­es: it includes move­ment of the stom­ach lin­ing, the ten­sion of the sinews, and the beat­ing of the heart.

One of the most trag­ic mis­un­der­stand­ings of med­i­ta­tion casts it as a men­tal dis­ci­pline, split­ting mind and body as West­ern thought is wont to do for cen­turies now. But the aware­ness cul­ti­vat­ed in med­i­ta­tion is aware­ness of every­thing: the sens­es, the body, the breath, the space around us, our cog­ni­tion and emo­tion. Every Bud­dhist tra­di­tion and sec­u­lar off­shoot has its way of teach­ing stu­dents what to do with their often-ignored bod­ies while they med­i­tate. The dif­fer­ences between them are most­ly slight, and you’ll find a good guid­ed intro­duc­tion to begin­ning med­i­ta­tion focused on the body just above, led by Mingyur Rin­poche.

The hap­pi­ness one can derive from a med­i­ta­tion prac­tice does arrive, accord­ing to med­i­ta­tors world­wide, but it is not a soli­tary achieve­ment, Bud­dhist teach­ers say, a prize claimed for one­self like a prof­it wind­fall. It is, rather, the result of more com­pas­sion, and hence of more humil­i­ty, bet­ter rela­tion­ships, and less self-involve­ment; the result of strip­ping away rather than acquir­ing. Bud­dhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who left a career in cel­lu­lar genet­ics in his twen­ties to study and prac­tice in the Himalayas, hasn’t shied away from mar­ket­ing as a way to teach peo­ple to med­i­tate. But he is also upfront about the impor­tance of ethics to begin­ning medi­a­tion.

In addi­tion to being a “con­fi­dante of the Dalai Lama,” notes Busi­ness Insid­er, Ricard is also “a viral TED Talk speak­er, and a best­selling author.” His mes­sage is the impor­tance of compassion—not as a goal to achieve some time in the future, but as the very place to start. “There’s noth­ing mys­te­ri­ous” about it, he says in an inter­view on Busi­ness Insider’s pod­cast. He then goes on to describe the basic prac­tices of “Met­ta, ”among oth­er things a way of train­ing one­self to have kind and lov­ing inten­tions for oth­ers in an ever-widen­ing cir­cle out­ward. In the video above, Ricard talks about the prac­tice, and the sci­ence, of com­pas­sion at Google.

Many peo­ple balk at this kind of sen­ti­men­tal stuff, even from a man Google describes as “the world’s best bridge between mod­ern sci­ence and ancient wis­dom.” But if we can hear any­thing in the ancient wis­dom dis­tilled by these Bud­dhist teach­ers, per­haps it’s a sim­ple idea fast-med­i­ta­tion apps and util­i­tar­i­an pro­grams gen­er­al­ly skip. No, you do not need to put on robes, become a monk or nun, or take on a set of ancient tra­di­tions, beliefs, or rit­u­als. But as Amer­i­can Bud­dhist teacher Jack Korn­field says below, “if you want to learn to be wise and present, the first step is to refrain from harm­ing your­self or oth­ers.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Presents a 15-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion: A Time-Test­ed Way to Stop Think­ing About Think­ing

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear Laurie Anderson Read from The Tibetan Book of the Dead on New Album Songs from the Bardo

in Music, Religion | August 16th, 2019

Lau­rie Ander­son began her career as an artist in the late 1960s, and since then she’s made con­nec­tions both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al with many of the most influ­en­tial cul­tur­al fig­ures of the past five decades. She has also, inevitably, seen a fair few of them depart this earth­ly exis­tence, includ­ing her hus­band Lou Reed. The ques­tion of what hap­pens to the dead is, for Ander­son, appar­ent­ly not with­out inter­est, even in the case of the non-human dead: the 2015 doc­u­men­tary Heart of a Dog traces the jour­ney of Ander­son­’s late pet Lola­belle through the bar­do, in Tibetan Bud­dhism the lim­i­nal state between death and rebirth.

The bar­do is the cen­tral theme of Bar­do Thodol, bet­ter known to West­ern­ers in trans­la­tion as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. On the new album Songs from the Bar­do, Ander­son reads from that eighth-cen­tu­ry text with impro­vi­sa­tion­al accom­pa­ni­ment by, among oth­ers, Tibetan musi­cian Ten­zin Cho­e­gyal and com­pos­er Jesse Paris Smith.

Stere­ogum’s Peter Hel­man writes that “Smith, the daugh­ter of punk leg­end Pat­ti Smith” — one of the many still-liv­ing influ­en­tial artists in Ander­son­’s wide net­work — “first met Cho­e­gyal in 2008 at the annu­al Tibet House US Ben­e­fit Con­cert at Carnegie Hall.” Sev­en years lat­er, they enlist­ed Ander­son to nar­rate the first per­formed ver­sion of what would become Songs from the Bar­do.

“Ander­son nar­rates text from the Tibetan Book Of the Dead while Cho­e­gyal, Smith, cel­list Rubin Kod­he­li, and per­cus­sion­ist Shahzad Ismai­ly pro­vide the musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment,” writes Hel­man. “Smith plays piano and cre­ates drone beds using a col­lec­tion of crys­tal bowls, while Cho­e­gyal incor­po­rates tra­di­tion­al Tibetan instru­ments like ling­bu (a bam­boo flute), dranyen (a lute-like stringed instru­ment), singing bowls, gong, and his own voice.” In the record’s lin­er notes, Cho­e­gyal writes of try­ing to “chan­nel the wis­dom and tra­di­tions of my ances­tors through my music in a very con­tem­po­rary way while hold­ing the depth of my lin­eage.” The music, Ander­son explains, “is meant to help you float out of your body, to go into these oth­er realms, and to let your­self do that with­out bound­aries.”

You can get a taste of this tran­scen­dence from “Lotus Born, No Need to Fear” the first sam­ple track from the album the group has released. On it Ander­son reads of the expe­ri­ence of the bar­do, where “con­scious­ness becomes airy, speed­ing, sway­ing, and imper­ma­nent.” For a Metafil­ter user named Capt. Renault, lis­ten­ing brings to mind anoth­er of Ander­son­’s art­works: her vir­tu­al-real­ty piece Aloft, which “has you sit­ting in an emp­ty air­plane which dis­in­te­grates around you, leav­ing you high, high above the ground with no sup­port. You are aware of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of death, but Lau­rie’s smooth, com­fort­ing voice leads to a com­plete absence of fear, and you are free to explore this world she’s cre­at­ed. Because of Lau­rie, I faced my death and I did­n’t mind it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Cohen Nar­rates Film on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fea­tur­ing the Dalai Lama (1994)

Lou Reed and Lau­rie Anderson’s Three Rules for Liv­ing Well: A Short and Suc­cinct Life Phi­los­o­phy

Lau­rie Anderson’s Top 10 Books to Take to a Desert Island

Lau­rie Ander­son Cre­ates a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Instal­la­tion That Takes View­ers on an Uncon­ven­tion­al Tour of the Moon

When Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD, Expe­ri­enc­ing “the Most Serene, the Most Beau­ti­ful Death” (1963)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Manuscript Reveals How Medieval Nun, Joan of Leeds, Faked Her Own Death to Escape the Convent

in History, Religion | August 12th, 2019

“The time­worn image of clois­tered nuns as escapists, spurned lovers or naïve waifs has lit­tle basis in real­i­ty today,” wrote Julia Lieblich in a 1983 New York Times arti­cle, “The Clois­tered Life.” “It takes more than a botched-up love affair to lure edu­cat­ed women in their 20’s and 30’s to the clois­ter in the 1980’s.”

The devo­tion that drew women to clois­tered life in the fast-paced 80s, or today, also drew women in the mid­dle ages. But in those days, an edu­ca­tion was much hard­er to come by. Many women became nuns because no oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties were avail­able. “Con­vent offer­ings,” Eudie Pak explains at History.com, “includ­ed read­ing and writ­ing in Latin, arith­metic, gram­mar, music, morals, rhetoric, geom­e­try and astron­o­my.” Oth­er pur­suits includ­ed “spin­ning, weav­ing and embroi­dery,” par­tic­u­lar­ly among more afflu­ent nuns.

Those “from less­er means were expect­ed to do more ardu­ous labor as part of their reli­gious life.” Who knows what kinds of hard­ships 14th cen­tu­ry Bene­dic­tine Eng­lish nun Joan of Leeds endured while at St. Clement pri­o­ry in York? The tedi­um alone may have dri­ven her over the edge. Nor do we know why she first entered the convent—whether dri­ven by faith, a desire for self-improve­ment, a “botched-up love affair,” or a less-than-vol­un­tary com­mit­ment.

We know almost noth­ing of Joan’s life, except that at some time in 1318, she faked her death, left behind a fake body to bury, and escaped the con­vent to pur­sue what William Melton, then Arch­bish­op of York, called “the way of car­nal lust.” Joan’s sis­ters aid­ed in her great escape, as the arch­bish­op wrote in a let­ter: “numer­ous of her accom­plices, evil­do­ers, with mal­ice afore­thought, craft­ed a dum­my in the like­ness of her body in order to mis­lead the devot­ed faith­ful.”

The episode—or what we know of it from Melton’s register—struck Uni­ver­si­ty of York pro­fes­sor Sarah Rees Jones as “extraordinary—like a Mon­ty Python sketch.” Joan’s sto­ry has become a high­light of The North­ern Way, a project that “seeks to assess and ana­lyze the polit­i­cal roles of the Arch­bish­ops of York over the peri­od 1306–1406.” A num­ber of records from the peri­od have been dig­i­tized, includ­ing William Melton’s reg­istry, in which Joan’s escape appears (see the page of scrib­al notes above).

One of the arch­bish­op’s roles involved inter­ced­ing in such cas­es of run­away monks and nuns. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly,” Rees Jones remarks, “we don’t know the out­come of the case” of Joan. Often, as one might expect, escapes like hers—though few as picaresque—had to do with “not want­i­ng to be celi­bate…. Many of the peo­ple would have been com­mit­ted to a reli­gious house when they were in their teens, and then they didn’t all take to the reli­gious life.”

The arch­bish­op put mat­ters rather less char­i­ta­bly: “Hav­ing turned her back on decen­cy and the good of reli­gion,” he writes, “seduced by inde­cen­cy, she involved her­self irrev­er­ent­ly and per­vert­ed her path of life arro­gant­ly to the way of car­nal lust and away from pover­ty and obe­di­ence, and, hav­ing bro­ken her vows and dis­card­ed the reli­gious habit, she now wan­ders at large to the noto­ri­ous per­il to her soul and to the scan­dal of all of her order.”

Or, as we might say today, she was ready to embark on a new life path. So des­per­ate­ly ready, it seems, that we might only hope Joan of Leeds remained “at large” and found hap­pi­ness else­where. Learn more about The North­ern Way project here.

via The Guardian/Medieval­ist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Expe­ri­ence the Mys­ti­cal Music of Hilde­gard Von Bin­gen: The First Known Com­pos­er in His­to­ry (1098 – 1179)

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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The Unexpected Ways Eastern Philosophy Can Make Us Wiser, More Compassionate & Better Able to Appreciate Our Lives

in Philosophy, Religion | August 2nd, 2019

I feel com­pelled to start this post with a dis­claimer: do not take the eight-and-a-half-minute video above, “Six Ideas from East­ern Phi­los­o­phy” from Alain de Botton’s School of Life series, as an author­i­ta­tive state­ment on East­ern Phi­los­o­phy.

Not that you would, or that de Bot­ton makes such a claim, but in an age of uncrit­i­cal over­con­sump­tion, infi­nite scrolling, and indi­vid­u­al­ly-wrapped explain­ers, it seems worth the reminder. No tradition—and cer­tain­ly not one as incal­cu­la­bly rich, deep, and ancient as the schools of thought summed up as “East­ern Philosophy”—can be para­phrased in an ani­mat­ed list.

Think of “Six Ideas from East­ern Phi­los­o­phy” as a teas­er. If you’ve resigned your­self to the fact that suf­fer­ing is ever-present and universal—the first idea on de Botton’s list and the Buddha’s first Noble Truth—you might love… or make a good faith effort to appre­ci­ate… The Mid­dle Length Dis­cours­es, the Shobo­gen­zo, the poet­ry and songs of Han Shan and Milarepa, or the thou­sands of trans­la­tions, com­men­taries, adap­ta­tions, and etcetera about them.

But the video isn’t about famous texts. The logo­cen­tric char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of phi­los­o­phy as only writ­ing per­sists, despite its seri­ous lim­i­ta­tions. In many East­ern tra­di­tions, writ­ing and study are only one part of com­plex reli­gious prac­tices. The first two ideas on de Botton’s list come from ear­ly Indi­an Bud­dhism; the third from Chi­nese Chan Bud­dhism, the fourth and fifth are Daoist con­cepts; and the sixth, kintsu­gi, comes from Japan­ese Zen.

De Botton’s title is mis­lead­ing. As he goes on to show, in brief, but with vivid exam­ples and com­par­isons, these are not “ideas” in the broad­ly Pla­ton­ic sense of pure abstrac­tions but for­mal­ized ways of being with oth­ers and being alone, of being with objects and nat­ur­al for­ma­tions that embody eth­i­cal ideals of bal­ance, equa­nim­i­ty, con­tent­ment, kind­ness, care, and deep appre­ci­a­tion for art and nature, with all their imper­fec­tions and dis­ap­point­ments.

Can we make much sense of the ado­ra­tion of the bod­hisatt­va Guanyin (whom de Bot­ton com­pares to the Vir­gin Mary) if we nev­er vis­it one of her tem­ples or call for her com­pas­sion­ate aid? Can we study the sub­tleties of bam­boo with­out bam­boo? Can we grasp the Four Noble Truths if we can’t sit still long enough for seri­ous self-reflec­tion? Some­times the prac­tices, land­scapes, and icono­gra­phies of East­ern phi­los­o­phy do not seem sep­a­ra­ble from ideas about them.

If there’s a bow to tie on de Botton’s sum­ma­ry, maybe it’s this: from these Bud­dhist and Daoist per­spec­tives, the end­less bifur­ca­tions of West­ern thought are illu­so­ry. Pain, imper­fec­tion, and uncer­tain­ly are inevitable and not to be feared but com­pas­sion­ate­ly accept­ed. And phi­los­o­phy is some­thing that hap­pens in the body and mind togeth­er, an idea cer­tain­ly not alien to the walk­ing thinkers of the West.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

East­ern Phi­los­o­phy Explained with Three Ani­mat­ed Videos by Alain de Botton’s School of Life

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy: Watch the 1960 TV Show, East­ern Wis­dom and Mod­ern Life

What Is a Zen Koan? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to East­ern Philo­soph­i­cal Thought Exper­i­ments

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him

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Atheists & Agnostics Also Frequently Believe in the Supernatural, a New Study Shows

in Religion | June 13th, 2019

To be a non-believ­er in some parts of the world, and in much of Europe for many cen­turies, means to com­mit a crime against the state. Even where unbe­lief goes unpun­ished by the law, “athe­ists, agnos­tics, and oth­er non-believ­ers,” writes Scot­ty Hen­dricks at Big Think, “are among the most dis­liked, untrust­ed, and mis­un­der­stood peo­ple.” Iden­ti­fied with Satanists (who are equal­ly mis­un­der­stood), non-believ­ers are pre­sumed to be anti-the­ists, hell bent on destroy­ing, or at least maim­ing, reli­gion with their know-it-all dog­ma­tism and hatred of dif­fer­ent beliefs.

There may be some pro­jec­tion going on here, and maybe it goes both ways at times, though the bal­ance of pow­er, at least in the U.S., decid­ed­ly tips in favor of cer­tain dog­mat­ic reli­gions. But as a new whitepa­per from the UK group Under­stand­ing Unbe­lief found, in a wide-rang­ing sur­vey of non-believ­ers in six coun­tries around the world, “pop­u­lar assump­tions about ‘con­vinced, dog­mat­ic athe­ists’ do not stand up to scruti­ny.” The out­lier here is the reli­gious­ly inflamed U.S. “Although Amer­i­can athe­ists are typ­i­cal­ly fair­ly con­fi­dent in their views about God, impor­tant­ly, so too are Amer­i­cans in gen­er­al.”

The paper’s authors are pro­fes­sors in the­ol­o­gy, psy­chol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, and reli­gious stud­ies from four major U.K. Uni­ver­si­ties. They out­line their eight key find­ings at the out­set, then get into specifics about what the data says and how it was obtained, with large, full-col­or charts and graphs. The study shows more agree­ment than most of us might assume between the reli­gious and non-reli­gious on “the val­ues most impor­tant for ‘find­ing mean­ing in the world and your own life.’”

“Fam­i­ly” and “Free­dom” ranked high­ly. “Less unan­i­mous­ly so,” did “’Com­pas­sion,’ ‘Truth,’ ‘Nature,’ and ‘Sci­ence,’” which may come as lit­tle sur­prise. The social and polit­i­cal iden­ti­fi­ca­tions of non-believ­ers fluc­tu­ate wide­ly between the six countries—Brazil, Den­mark, Japan, Chi­na, the U.S., and the U.K.—but, “with only a few excep­tions, athe­ists and agnos­tics endorse the real­i­ties of objec­tive moral val­ues, human dig­ni­ty, and atten­dant rights, and the ‘deep val­ue’ of nature.”

These con­clu­sions should inter­est non-believ­ers and believ­ers alike in the six coun­tries sur­veyed, but the most sen­sa­tion­al research find­ing states that “despite reject­ing or at least ques­tion­ing the notion of gods, unbe­liev­ers aren’t whol­ly divorced from super­sti­tious belief,” writes Hen­dricks. The study’s authors put things in a more mea­sured way: “only minori­ties of athe­ists or agnos­tics in each of our coun­tries appear to be thor­ough­go­ing nat­u­ral­ists,” rul­ing out the super­nat­ur­al entire­ly.

Hen­dricks lists some exam­ples:

Up to third of self-declared athe­ists in Chi­na believe in astrol­o­gy. A quar­ter of Brazil­ian athe­ists believe in rein­car­na­tion, and a sim­i­lar num­ber of their Dan­ish coun­ter­parts think some peo­ple have mag­i­cal pow­ers.

These find­ings might be con­sis­tent with the study’s method­ol­o­gy, which sur­veyed peo­ple who agreed with either 1. I don’t believe in God [or oth­er divin­i­ty or spir­it] or 2. I don’t know whether there is a God, and I don’t believe there is any way to find out. Nei­ther of these mutu­al­ly excludes the à la carte spir­i­tu­al­ism of astrol­o­gy, rein­car­na­tion, or mag­ic, a fact that many reli­gious believ­ers can­not wrap their heads around.

In the 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies, for exam­ple, belief in seances, tarot, mes­merism, and oth­er seem­ing­ly super­nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na flour­ished, quite often inde­pen­dent­ly of par­tic­u­lar reli­gious belief sys­tems. One of the most ratio­nal minds of the time, or the cre­ator of the most ratio­nal mind of the time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, believed in fairies. Pierre Curie “was an athe­ist who had an endur­ing, some­what sci­en­tif­ic, inter­est in spir­i­tu­al­ism.”

The study’s find­ings are “in line,” Hen­dricks points out, “with pre­vi­ous stud­ies that show non-believ­ers are just as prone to irra­tional think­ing as their reli­gious coun­ter­parts.” Sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­ages of athe­ists and agnos­tics express some belief in astrol­o­gy, kar­ma, “a uni­ver­sal spir­it or life force,” and oth­er super­nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na. Hen­dricks quotes Michio Kaku’s sug­ges­tion that there may be “a gene for super­sti­tion, a gene for hearsay, a gene for mag­ic.” I don’t believe geneti­cists have found such a thing. But cul­ture, at any rate, is not reducible to biol­o­gy.

The fact that humans see, hear, feel, and believe things that may not actu­al­ly exist seems to be an evo­lu­tion­ary trait. What may be equal­ly, if not more, inter­est­ing is the way those super­nat­ur­al things, what­ev­er they are, both resem­ble and vast­ly dif­fer from each oth­er, their cul­tur­al speci­fici­ties woven inex­tri­ca­bly into the tex­ture of lan­guage and cus­tom. What and how we think can­not be ful­ly sep­a­rat­ed either from our genes or from the con­cep­tu­al appa­ra­tus we inher­it, and that forms our pic­ture of the world. Read the full Under­stand­ing Unbe­lief study here.

via Big­Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al Map of the World’s Major Reli­gions (and Non-Reli­gions)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the World’s Five Major Reli­gions: Hin­duism, Judaism, Bud­dhism, Chris­tian­i­ty & Islam

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Discover Kōlams, the Traditional Indian Patterns That Combine Art, Mathematics & Magic

in Art, Math, Religion | May 20th, 2019

Have accom­plished abstract geo­met­ri­cal artists come out of any demo­graph­ic in greater num­bers than from the women of South Asia? Not when even the most demand­ing art-school cur­ricu­lum can’t hope to equal the rig­or of the kōlam, a com­plex kind of line draw­ing prac­ticed by women every­where from India to Sri Lan­ka to Malaysia to Thai­land. Using hum­ble mate­ri­als like chalk and rice flour on the ground in front of their homes, they inter­weave not just lines, shapes, and pat­terns but reli­gious, philo­soph­i­cal, and mag­i­cal motifs as well — and they cre­ate their kōlams anew each and every day.

“Feed­ing A Thou­sand Souls: Kōlam” by Thacher Gallery at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Fran­cis­co is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

“Tak­ing a clump of rice flour in a bowl (or a coconut shell), the kōlam artist steps onto her fresh­ly washed can­vas: the ground at the entrance of her house, or any patch of floor mark­ing an entry­point,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Rohi­ni Cha­ki.

“Work­ing swift­ly, she takes pinch­es of rice flour and draws geo­met­ric pat­terns: curved lines, labyrinthine loops around red or white dots, hexag­o­nal frac­tals, or flo­ral pat­terns resem­bling the lotus, a sym­bol of the god­dess of pros­per­i­ty, Lak­sh­mi, for whom the kōlam is drawn as a prayer in illus­tra­tion.”

Col­or­ful Kolam — Sivasankaran — Own work

Kōlams are thought to bring pros­per­i­ty, but they also have oth­er uses, such as feed­ing ants, birds, and oth­er pass­ing crea­tures. Cha­ki quotes Uni­ver­si­ty of San Fran­cis­co The­ol­o­gy and Reli­gious Stud­ies pro­fes­sor Vijaya Nagara­jan as describ­ing their ful­fill­ing the Hin­du “karmic oblig­a­tion” to “feed a thou­sand souls.” Kōlams have also become an object of gen­uine inter­est for math­e­mati­cians and com­put­er sci­en­tists due to their recur­sive nature: “They start out small, but can be built out by con­tin­u­ing to enlarge the same sub­pat­tern, cre­at­ing a com­plex over­all design,” Cha­ki writes. “This has fas­ci­nat­ed math­e­mati­cians, because the pat­terns elu­ci­date fun­da­men­tal math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples.”

“Kolam” by resakse is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Like any tra­di­tion­al art form, the kōlam does­n’t have quite as many prac­ti­tion­ers as it used to, much less prac­ti­tion­ers who can meet the stan­dard of mas­tery of com­plet­ing an entire work with­out once stand­ing up or even lift­ing their hand. But even so, the kōlam is hard­ly on the brink of dying out: you can see a few of their cre­ators in action in the video at the top of the post, and the age of social media has offered kōlam cre­ators of any age — and now even the occa­sion­al man — the kind of expo­sure that even the busiest front door could nev­er match. Some who get into kōlams in the 21st cen­tu­ry may want to cre­ate ones that show ever more com­plex­i­ty of geom­e­try and depth of ref­er­ence, but the best among them won’t for­get the mean­ing, accord­ing to Cha­ki, of the for­m’s very name: beau­ty.

Read more about kōlams at Atlas Obscu­ra.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math­e­mat­ics Made Vis­i­ble: The Extra­or­di­nary Math­e­mat­i­cal Art of M.C. Esch­er

New Iran­ian Video Game, Engare, Explores the Ele­gant Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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An Animated Introduction to the World’s Five Major Religions: Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity & Islam

in Religion | May 13th, 2019

No mat­ter the strength of par­tic­u­lar beliefs, or dis­be­liefs, reli­gions of every kind are all equal­ly fun­da­men­tal to the human expe­ri­ence. This was so for thou­sands of years before the advent of the world’s big five reli­gions, and for thou­sands of years after. “Reli­gion has been an aspect of cul­ture for as long as it has exist­ed, and there are count­less vari­a­tions of its prac­tice,” says Epis­co­pal priest and anthro­pol­o­gist John Bel­laimey in the TED-Ed video above. “Com­mon to all reli­gions is an appeal for mean­ing beyond the emp­ty van­i­ties and low­ly real­i­ties of exis­tence.”

Reli­gions par­tic­u­lar­ize a set of arche­typ­al human respons­es to uni­ver­sal meta­phys­i­cal ques­tions like “Where do we come from?” and “How do I live a life of mean­ing?” and “What hap­pens to us after we die?” Such ques­tions find answers out­side the bound­aries of reli­gious faith. For an increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple, sci­ence and sec­u­lar phi­los­o­phy offer com­fort­ing, even beau­ti­ful nat­u­ral­is­tic expla­na­tions. And mil­lions more feel the pull of intu­itions about a high­er pow­er or “a source from which we all come and to which we must return.”

Reli­gion gives the big ques­tions faces and names, of divini­ties, demons, and holy men (in the five big, it has been almost entire­ly men). Whether these fig­ures exist­ed or not, their leg­ends shape cul­ture and his­to­ry and are shaped and changed in turn. Bel­lamy sur­veys the big five world reli­gions with an overview of their cen­tral nar­ra­tives, illus­trat­ed with mon­tages of reli­gious art. The infor­ma­tion is at the lev­el of a 101 course intro­duc­tion, but the num­ber of peo­ple in the world who know lit­tle to noth­ing about oth­er reli­gions is like­ly quite high, giv­en the num­bers of peo­ple who know so lit­tle about their own. We can prob­a­bly all learn some­thing here we didn’t know before.

Bellamy’s approach broad­ly sug­gests that what mat­ters most in reli­gion is sto­ry. But to dis­miss reli­gions as “just sto­ries” miss­es the point. Pure­ly at the lev­el of nar­ra­tive, we can think of reli­gions as cre­ative ways to tell the sto­ries we find untellable. This says noth­ing about religion’s effects on the world. Is it a force for good or ill? Giv­en its role in every stage of human cul­tur­al devel­op­ment, both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive, maybe the ques­tion is unan­swer­able. There are too many vari­eties of reli­gious expe­ri­ence over too great a span of time to reck­on with.

Bellamy’s char­i­ta­ble expla­na­tions of the major five reli­gions high­light their con­tin­gent nature—he locates each faith in its par­tic­u­lar time and place of ori­gin. But he also shows the uni­ver­sal­iz­ing ten­den­cies of each tra­di­tion, qual­i­ties that made them so portable. He does not, how­ev­er, men­tion that more inclu­sive inter­pre­ta­tions usu­al­ly came from revolts against more lim­it­ed orig­i­nal designs. Reli­gions and cul­tures evolved togeth­er, mate­ri­al­ly and cul­tur­al­ly. As they spread and occu­pied more ter­ri­to­ry with wider pop­u­la­tions, they grew and adapt­ed.

In his book The Tree of World Reli­gions, Bel­lamy devel­ops such his­tor­i­cal mate­r­i­al into an explo­ration of twen­ty world reli­gions from Hin­duism to Rasta­far­i­an­ism, show­ing each one as a col­lec­tive act of sto­ry­telling. Com­piled from a 25-year high school world reli­gions class Bel­lamy taught, the book cov­ers the Mayans, the Norse, and Socrates, Laozi, the Hebrew Prophets, and the Bud­dha. In what Karl Jaspers called “the Axi­al Age,” writes Ama­zon, these lat­er sages “moved reli­gion from most­ly-super­nat­ur­al to most­ly-human­is­tic, shift­ing the focus on God’s inscrutable oth­er­ness to God’s increas­ing insis­tence on eth­i­cal behav­ior as the high­est form of wor­ship.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al Map of the World’s Major Reli­gions (and Non-Reli­gions)

Chris­tian­i­ty Through Its Scrip­tures: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty 

Take Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Course on Bud­dhism, One of Five World Reli­gions Class­es Offered Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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