The Zen of Bill Murray: I Want to Be “Really Here, Really in It, Really Alive in the Moment”

in Life, Philosophy, Religion | December 19th, 2019

We all know, on the deep­est lev­el, what we have the poten­tial to achieve; once in a great while, we even catch glimpses of just what we could do if only we put our minds to it. But what, if any­thing, does it mean to “put our minds to it”? In break­ing down that cliché, we might look to the exam­ple of Bill Mur­ray, an actor for whom break­ing down clichés has become a method of not just work­ing but liv­ing. In the 2015 Char­lie Rose clip above, Mur­ray tells of receiv­ing a late-night phone call from a friend’s drunk­en sis­ter. “You have no idea how much you could do, Bill, if you could just — you can do so much,” the woman kept insist­ing. But to the still more or less asleep Mur­ray, her voice sound­ed like that of “a vision­ary speak­ing to you in the night and com­ing to you in your dream.”

Through her ine­bri­a­tion, this woman spoke direct­ly to a per­sis­tent desire of Mur­ray’s, one he describes when Rose asks him “what it is that you want that you don’t have.” Mur­ray replies that he’d “like to be more con­sis­tent­ly here,” that he’d like to “see how long I can last as being real­ly here — you know, real­ly in it, real­ly alive in the moment.” He’d like to see what he could do if he could stay off human auto-pilot, if he “were able to not get dis­tract­ed, to not change chan­nels in my mind and body, so I would just, you know, be my own chan­nel.” He grounds this poten­tial­ly spir­i­tu­al-sound­ing idea in phys­i­cal terms: “It is all con­tained in your body, every­thing you’ve got: your mind, your spir­it, your soul, your emo­tions, it is all con­tained in your body. All the prospects, all the chances you ever have.”

Mur­ray had spo­ken in even more detail of the body’s impor­tance at the pre­vi­ous year’s Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val. “How much do you weigh?” he asked his audi­ence there, lead­ing them into an impromp­tu guid­ed med­i­ta­tion. “Try to feel that weight in your seat right now, in your bot­tom right now.” If you can “feel that weight in your body, if you can come back into the most per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, a very per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, which is: I am. This is me now. Here I am, right now. This is me now.” The idea is to be here now, to bor­row the words with which coun­ter­cul­tur­al icon Ram Dass titled his most pop­u­lar book. But Mur­ray approached it by read­ing some­thing quite dif­fer­ent: the writ­ings of Gre­co-Armen­ian Sufi mys­tic George Ivanovich Gur­d­ji­eff, whose con­tri­bu­tion to Mur­ray’s comedic per­sona we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

Gur­d­ji­eff believed that most of us live out our lives in a hyp­no­sis-like state of “wak­ing sleep,” nev­er touch­ing the state of high­er con­scious­ness that might allow us to more clear­ly per­ceive real­i­ty and more ful­ly real­ize our poten­tial. In recent years, Mur­ray has tak­en on some­thing like this role him­self, hav­ing “long bypassed mere celebri­ty sta­tus to become some­thing close to a spir­i­tu­al sym­bol, a guru of zen, and his fre­quent appear­ances among the mass­es (in a karaoke bar! In a couple’s engage­ment pho­to!) are report­ed on the inter­net with the excite­ment of sight­ings of the mes­si­ah.” So writes the Guardian’s Hadley Free­man in a Mur­ray pro­file from 2019, which quotes the actor-come­di­an-trick­ster-Ghost­buster-bod­hisatt­va return­ing to his wish to attain an ever-greater state of pres­ence. “If there’s life hap­pen­ing and you run from it, you’re not doing the world a favor,” he says. “You have to engage.” And if you do, you may dis­cov­er pos­si­bil­i­ties you’d nev­er even sus­pect­ed before.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy of Bill Mur­ray: The Intel­lec­tu­al Foun­da­tions of His Comedic Per­sona

Lis­ten to Bill Mur­ray Lead a Guid­ed Medi­a­tion on How It Feels to Be Bill Mur­ray

An Ani­mat­ed Bill Mur­ray on the Advan­tages & Dis­ad­van­tages of Fame

Nine Tips from Bill Mur­ray & Cel­list Jan Vogler on How to Study Intense­ly and Opti­mize Your Learn­ing

What Is High­er Con­scious­ness?: How We Can Tran­scend Our Pet­ty, Day-to-Day Desires and Gain a Deep­er Wis­dom

97-Year-Old Philoso­pher Pon­ders the Mean­ing of Life: “What Is the Point of It All?”

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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“The Philosophy of “Flow”: A Brief Introduction to Taoism

in Philosophy, Religion | December 17th, 2019

“In the West,” the I Ching, or the Book of Changes, “is main­ly known as a div­ina­tion man­u­al,” writes philoso­pher and nov­el­ist Will Buck­ing­ham, “part of the wild car­ni­val of spu­ri­ous notions that is New Age spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.” But just as one can use the Tarot as a means of read­ing the present, rather than pre­dict­ing future events, so too can the I Ching serve to remind us, again and again, of a prin­ci­ple we are too apt to for­get: the crit­i­cal impor­tance of non-action, or what is called wu wei in Chi­nese phi­los­o­phy.

Non-action is not pas­siv­i­ty, though it has been mis­char­ac­ter­ized as such by cul­tures that over­val­ue aggres­sion and self-asser­tion. It is a way of exer­cis­ing pow­er by attun­ing to the rhythms of its mys­te­ri­ous source. In the reli­gious and philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion that became known as Tao­ism, non-action achieves its most canon­i­cal expres­sion in the Tao Te Ching, the clas­sic text attrib­uted to sixth cen­tu­ry B.C.E. thinker Laozi, who may or may not have been a real his­tor­i­cal fig­ure.

The Tao Te Ching describes non-action as a para­dox in which dual­is­tic ten­sions like pas­siv­i­ty and aggres­sion resolve.

That which offers no resis­tance,
Over­comes the hard­est sub­stances.
That which offers no resis­tance
Can enter where there is no space.
Few in the world can com­pre­hend
The teach­ing with­out words, or
Under­stand the val­ue of non-action.

Wu wei is some­times trans­lat­ed as “effort­less action” or the “action of non-action,” phras­es that high­light its dynam­ic qual­i­ty. Arthur Waley used the phrase “action­less activ­i­ty” in his Eng­lish ver­sion of the Tao Te Ching. In the short video intro­duc­tion above, “philo­soph­i­cal enter­tain­er” Einzel­gänger explains “the prac­ti­cal sense” of wu wei in terms of that which ath­letes call “the zone,” a state of “action with­out striv­ing” in which bod­ies “move through space effort­less­ly.” But non-action is also an inner qual­i­ty, char­ac­ter­ized by its depth and still­ness as much as its strength.

Among the many sym­bols of wu wei is the action of water against stone—a grace­ful organ­ic move­ment that “over­comes the hard­est sub­stances” and “can enter where there is no space.” The image illus­trates what Einzel­gänger explains in con­tem­po­rary terms as a “phi­los­o­phy of flow.” We can­not grasp the Tao—the hid­den cre­ative ener­gy that ani­mates the universe—with dis­cur­sive for­mu­las and def­i­n­i­tions. But we can meet it through “still­ness of mind, curb­ing the sens­es, being hum­ble, and the ces­sa­tion of striv­ing, in order to open our­selves up to the work­ings of the uni­verse.”

The state of “flow,” or total absorp­tion in the present, has been pop­u­lar­ized by psy­chol­o­gists in recent years, who describe it as the secret to achiev­ing cre­ative ful­fill­ment. Non-action has its ana­logues in Sto­icis­m’s amor fati, Zen’s “back­ward step,” and Hen­ri Bergson’s élan vital. In the Tao te Ching, the Way appears as both a meta­phys­i­cal, if enig­mat­ic, phi­los­o­phy and a prac­ti­cal approach to life that tran­scends our indi­vid­ual goals. It is an impro­visato­ry prac­tice which, like rivers carv­ing out their beds, requires time and per­sis­tence to mas­ter.

In a sto­ry told by Taoist philoso­pher Zhuangzi, a renowned butch­er is asked to explain his seem­ing­ly effort­less skill at carv­ing up an ox. He replies it is the prod­uct of years of train­ing, dur­ing which he renounced the strug­gle to achieve, and came to rely on intu­ition rather than per­cep­tion or brute force. Embrac­ing non-action reveals to us the paths down which our tal­ents nat­u­ral­ly take us when we stop fight­ing with life. And it can show us how to han­dle what seem like insol­u­ble prob­lems by mov­ing through, over, and around them rather than crash­ing into them head on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

Albert Ein­stein Tells His Son The Key to Learn­ing & Hap­pi­ness is Los­ing Your­self in Cre­ativ­i­ty (or “Find­ing Flow”)

Slavoj Žižek: What Full­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

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

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Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

in Life, Neuroscience, Psychology, Religion | September 6th, 2019

St. Bene­dict by Fra Angeli­co, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We might imag­ine that life in a monastery is one of the safest, most pre­dictable ways of life on offer, and there­fore one of the least dis­tract­ed. But “medieval monks had a ter­ri­ble time con­cen­trat­ing,” writes Sam Hasel­by at Aeon, “and con­cen­tra­tion was their life­long work!” They com­plained of infor­ma­tion over­load, for­get­ful­ness, lack of focus, and over­stim­u­la­tion. Their jumpy brains, fun­da­men­tal­ly no dif­fer­ent from those we use to nav­i­gate our smart phones, were the cul­prit, though, like us, the monks found oth­er sources to blame.

“Some­times they accused demons of mak­ing their minds wan­der. Some­times they blamed the body’s base instincts.” Giv­en the nature of their restric­tive vows, it’s no won­der they found them­selves think­ing “about food or sex when they were sup­posed to be think­ing about God.” But the fact remains, as Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia pro­fes­sor Jamie Krein­er says in an inter­view with PRI’s The World, monks liv­ing 1600 years ago found them­selves con­stant­ly, painful­ly dis­tract­ed.

It wasn’t even nec­es­sar­i­ly about tech at all. It was about some­thing inher­ent in the mind. The dif­fer­ence between us and them is not that we are dis­tract­ed and they aren’t, it’s that they actu­al­ly had savvi­er ways of deal­ing with dis­trac­tion. Ways of train­ing their minds the way we might train our bod­ies.

So, what did the wis­est monks advise, and what can we learn, hun­dreds of years lat­er, from their wis­dom? Quite a lot, and much of it applic­a­ble even to our online lives. Some of what medieval monks like the 5th cen­tu­ry John Cass­ian advised may be too aus­tere for mod­ern tastes, even if we hap­pen to live in a monastery. But many of their prac­tices are the very same we now see pre­scribed as ther­a­peu­tic exer­cis­es and good per­son­al habits.

Cass­ian and his col­leagues devised solu­tions that “depend­ed on imag­i­nary pic­tures” and “bizarre ani­ma­tions” in the mind,” Hasel­by explains. Peo­ple were told to let their imag­i­na­tions run riot with images of sex, vio­lence, and mon­strous beings. “Nuns, monks, preach­ers and the peo­ple they edu­cat­ed were always encour­aged to visu­al­ize the mate­r­i­al they were pro­cess­ing,” often in some very graph­ic ways. The gore may not be fash­ion­able in con­tem­pla­tive set­tings these days, but ancient meth­ods of guid­ed imagery and cre­ative visu­al­iza­tion cer­tain­ly are.

So too are tech­niques like active lis­ten­ing and non­vi­o­lent com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which share many sim­i­lar­i­ties with St. Benedict’s first rule for his order: “Lis­ten and incline the ear of your heart.” Bene­dict spoke to the mind’s ten­den­cy to leap from thought to thought, to pre­judge and for­mu­late rebut­tals while anoth­er per­son speaks, to tune out. “Basi­cal­ly,” writes Fr. Michael Ren­nier, Bene­dic­t’s form of lis­ten­ing “is tak­ing time to hear in a cer­tain way, with an atti­tude of open­ness, and com­mit­ment to devote your whole self to the process,” with­out doing any­thing else.

Benedict’s advice, Ren­nier writes, is “great… because obsta­cles are all around, so we need to be inten­tion­al about over­com­ing them.” We do not need to share the same inten­tions as St. Bene­dict, how­ev­er, to take his advice to heart and stop treat­ing lis­ten­ing as wait­ing to speak, rather than as a prac­tice of mak­ing space for oth­ers and mak­ing space for silence. “Bene­dict knew the ben­e­fits of silence,” writes Alain de Botton’s School of Life, “He knew all about dis­trac­tion,” too, “how easy it is to want to keep check­ing up on the lat­est devel­op­ments, how addic­tive the gos­sip of the city can be.”

Silence allows us to not only hear oth­ers bet­ter, but to hear our deep­er or high­er selves, or the voice of God, or the uni­verse, or what­ev­er source of cre­ative ener­gy we tune into. Like their coun­ter­parts in the East, medieval Catholic monks also prac­ticed dai­ly med­i­ta­tion, includ­ing med­i­ta­tions on death, just one of sev­er­al meth­ods “Cis­ter­cian monks used to reshape their own men­tal states,” as Julia Bourke writes at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly.

“A medieval Cis­ter­cian and a mod­ern neu­ro­sci­en­tist” would agree on at least one thing, Bourke argues: “the prin­ci­ple that cer­tain feel­ings and emo­tions can be changed through med­i­ta­tive exer­cis­es.” No one devis­es numer­ous for­mal solu­tions to prob­lems they do not have; although their phys­i­cal cir­cum­stances could not have been more dif­fer­ent from ours, medieval Euro­pean monks seemed to suf­fer just as much as most of us do from dis­trac­tion. In some part, their lives were exper­i­ments in learn­ing to over­come it.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

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

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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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