"Keeping the Faith"

The apparent opposition between faith and belief on the one hand, and reason and skepticism on the other, troubles many of us who wish to pursue the spiritual life without the irrationality and dogmatism that sometimes characterizes religion. In this issue we explore what faith really is, its relation to rationality and the role of doubt in religious life. We also look at whether or not belief or faith in karma is necessary for karma to work.

Please email us at lamamarut@aci-la.org with recommendations for news stories, on-line videos, dharma books that you have found helpful, relevant websites, or anything else you’d like to share.

Attention Podcast listeners! If you have any questions for Lama Marut to answer in a podcast interview, please email podcast@aci-la.org and we’ll ask him for you.

Doubting Faith

One of the reasons for the popularity of Buddhism in the modern West, especially among the highly educated, is that it seems so pragmatic and rational. Unlike some of the other religions in the current spiritual marketplace, Buddhism appears to discourage blind faith and instead emphasizes an appealing reasonability. Buddhism can be seen to be cool and hip because it seems to conform so nicely to a modern, skeptical, and urbane worldview.

Some have seized on this portrait of Buddhism to argue that it is not really a religion at all. It is, according to some, more of a philosophy, therapy, or "science of the mind". And for many of us who are disillusioned with what we disdainfully refer to as "organized religion" (as opposed to "disorganized religion"?) but are still drawn to a spiritual life that won’t insult our intelligence, it’s just fine that Buddhism might not be a religion. For some of its contemporary adherents, the more secularized and rational the Buddhism, the better.

Whether or not we regard Buddhism as a religion, it’s not hard to find textual confirmation of this portrait of a rational Buddhism. The Buddha himself advised his followers to scrutinize the authenticity of his teachings like one would examine gold:

"As the wise test gold by burning, cutting and rubbing it (on a touchstone), so are you to accept my words only after examining them and not merely because you revere me."

With the recent rise of fundamentalism, where religious discourse tends to be authoritarian, doctrinaire, and closed-minded, it is reassuring to hear a spiritual teacher encouraging us to think for ourselves.

In another widely quoted passage from the Pali text known as the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha insists that we must abjure outside sources of authority and "figure things out for ourselves":

"Do not believe in something because of what others say, or because it has been handed down by tradition (parampara), or because it is the received opinion. Do not believe in something just because it is cited in the scriptures, or because it seems to be logical, philosophical, commonsensical, or in accordance with your preconceptions. And do not believe in things just because they are said by trustworthy people or by your guru. Only when you’ve figured things out for yourself – ‘this is immoral and blameworthy, disapproved of by the wise and conducive to ruin and suffering’ – should you reject them. And only when you’ve figured things out for yourself – ‘this is moral and praiseworthy, recommended by the wise and conducive to well-being and happiness’ – should you act accordingly."

Indeed, according to some sources, the last words the Buddha imparted to his disciples were to "Be your own lamps, be your own refuges. Take refuge in nothing outside yourself. Hold firm to the truth as a lamp and a refuge, and do not look for refuge to anything besides yourselves."

Such quotations jibe nicely with our modern sensibility and its stress on the individual, its egalitarianism and suspicion of authority, and its abhorrence of what we regard as the irrationality and superstitions of the past (and of the fundamentalisms of the present).

But choosing to represent Buddhism in only this way obscures another facet of the tradition. Faith (the Sanskrit is shraddha, for which see below) is also a prominent and necessary component of Buddhism, just as it is for every religion. We cannot easily shunt this element aside in the effort to make Buddhism more palatable to us secularized Westerners. Faith is at least as important to the Buddhist path as is rationality. And, what’s more, faith and reason are not the polar opposites many of us seem to believe they are.

Perhaps we can start by rehabilitating the true meaning of “faith.” The word does not automatically come with the adjective "blind" prefixed to it. Faith is not antithetical to reason. Indeed, as Gandhi noted, without reason faith cannot survive: "Faith must be enforced by reason. When faith becomes blind it dies."

Another word for faith is "conviction", believing something is true because one has really worked it out. One arrives at faith or conviction through exercising, not repudiating, one’s rationality. And this conviction then can serve to see you through the hard times. "Faith", wrote C. S. Lewis, "is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods".

Faith is not the opposite of reason; it is the opposite of what we might call "lazy doubt", the unwillingness to wrestle intellectually and emotionally with the thorny questions of life. This kind of doubt is regarded in Buddhism as one of the major mental afflictions (it made the "top six" list), for it underlies and enables inertia and thus bankrupts our hopes for self-improvement. "Thoughtless doubt" has been described by the first Dalai Lama, Gendun Drup, in the following verse:

It wanders through the sky pitch-black night,
Attacking our hopes for high spiritual goals,
A viper that threatens the life of our freedom;
Oh protect me I beg, from the terror
Of the demon of thoughtless doubt.

This kind of doubt is thus one of the biggest obstacles to spiritual progress. But it is unfortunately sort of chic in some corners of contemporary society. Being without convictions of any sort is sometimes seen as a mark of sophistication. Sogyal Rinpoche writes,

"If we were to put our minds to one powerful wisdom method and work with it directly, there is a real possibility we would become enlightened. Our minds, however, are riddled with confusion and doubt. I sometimes think that doubt is an even greater block to human evolution than is desire or attachment. Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence. We have become so falsely ‘sophisticated’ and neurotic that we take doubt itself for truth, and the doubt that is nothing more than ego’s desperate attempt to defend itself from wisdom is deified as the goal and fruit of true knowledge. This form of mean-spirited doubt is the shabby emperor of samsara, served by a flock of ‘experts’ who teach us not the open-souled and generous doubt that Buddha assured us was necessary for testing and proving the worth of the teachings, but a destructive form of doubt that leaves us nothing to believe in, nothing to hope for, and nothing to live by."

This kind of fashionable but dangerous lazy doubt paralyzes and depresses. In contrast, faith is the precondition of a vital spiritual life aimed at true happiness. In the Buddhist as well as the yoga texts, faith is listed as the first of the "five powers" (panca bala) that comprise a spiritual life. The power of faith (shraddha) counteracts the inaction that accompanies doubt and thus enables joyful effort (virya). Effort overcomes laziness and leads to mindfulness that in turn empowers the concentration (samadhi) necessary for the cultivation of wisdom (prajna).

Faith is thus the precondition for wisdom, as Arya Nagarjuna also notes in his "Precious Garland": "Because of the faith one has in it, one relies on a spiritual practice. And because of the wisdom one acquires through that practice, one really knows what’s what. Of these two, wisdom is the main thing and faith is its prerequisite." Without faith to inspire us, we never exert any effort and therefore never learn "what’s what". Immobilized by doubt, we remain inert and ignorant. It is faith that leads us to begin rational inquiry into the purpose of life, the causes of happiness and unhappiness, and the true methods for achieving our goals.

Placing faith in our teachers, in what they teach us, and in our ability to learn and progress provides the motivation to work for change. Too often the paralysis of doubt prevents us from even beginning – from finding a teacher and initiating the process of learning what they have to teach us. As Reginald Ray notes in regard to a typical reluctance to commit to a teacher, our doubt holds us back from taking the leap we must take if we are to move ahead:

"At a certain point, the disciple begins to realize that he or she could continue to hold on to reservation and suspicions, and could always wait until tomorrow to require further experiences and further proof of the teacher’s authenticity and reliability. But then the question arises, how much information is enough? At what point will one be convinced? And then one realizes that no matter how much information is acquired, there is always the uncertain future that stretches out in front forever. The disciple realizes that, at some point, to go further he or she will have to make a leap.

One begins to realize at this point that what is at stake here is not mistrust of the teacher but fundamental paranoia and unwillingness to trust anything. One always wants to hold on to some shred of solid ground, some filament of self-reference, to make sure that one is all right. But the disciple sees now that that basic mistrust itself is the problem; it is preventing him or her from going deeper. It is necessary to abandon oneself to the good graces of the teacher. At that point, one needs to leap."

Such a necessary "leap of faith" to overcome doubt and mistrust does not, however, entail abandoning all reasoning and questioning. While overcoming one kind of doubt is necessary to even begin a spiritual life, the cultivation of another kind of doubt is the condition of possibility for detaching from the complacency that thwarts and stifles our ability to work hard for our spiritual goals.

As Oscar Wilde has declared, "Skepticism is the beginning of faith." For without a skeptical attitude toward the truisms and mere appearances of the unexamined life, we can never grow into the mature conviction and wisdom that are born of hard intellectual and spiritual labor. Or as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche says (with his typical flair for the controversial), a worthy recipient of spiritual teaching must first be a total cynic:

"At this point, we are talking purely about the beginner’s level and the preparations that might be needed in order for spiritual transmission to occur in the very early stages. It is necessary for us to sharpen our cynicism, to sharpen our whole critical attitude towards what we are doing. That cynicism provides a basis for our study and work."

While faith is the antidote to one kind of doubt, another kind of doubt is thus the necessary correlate to faith itself. Freedom from suffering and the attainment of true happiness cannot come from passive acceptance of the status quo. Mark Twain was right when he noted, "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." It is doubt that impels us to start questioning what we have hitherto blindly accepted, and it is that questioning and rational inquiry that leads to conviction — a reasoned faith that frees us from ignorance and complacency.

In an article entitled "The Distance Between Faith and Doubt", Zen priest Sensei Sevan Ross argues that without "Great Doubt" there can be no "Great Faith":

"Doubt is what unseats the ego as we have come to know it. Doubt is the questioning that, if it grows enough and we have determination, can come to encompass everything. Life becomes questioning, period. . . .

Often someone can be convinced that they have Great Faith, but lack this kind of Doubt. When asked about this, I am thrown all the way back to memories of my Catholic childhood. Some of us had what we thought of as Great Faith. We accepted our inadequacy in God’s eyes and put our faith in His mercy. Or so it seemed. But you see, we had no Doubt. Not the Doubt of Zen, the Doubt of intense questioning. We started out with no questions at all. We took it all literally.

So, we never really had Great Faith. We couldn’t have, because Great Faith and Great Doubt are two ends of a spiritual walking stick. We grip one end with the grasp given to us by our Great Determination. We poke into the underbrush in the dark on our spiritual journey. This act is real spiritual practice – gripping the Faith end and poking ahead with the Doubt end of the stick. If we have no Faith, we have no Doubt. If we have no Determination, we never pick up the stick in the first place."

"Good doubt" (as opposed to the "lazy doubt" described above) is, therefore, not at odds with faith but rather is its requirement and complement. Without faith or conviction reason is stunted, marooned in indeterminacy and shallow pessimism.

So by all means be critical and rational as part of your spiritual path. Embrace doubt and even cynicism. Never accept things blindly. Buddhism does indeed call us to be skeptics and rationalists.

But begin by targeting the very doubt that keeps us in our suffering state. Sogyal Rinpoche challenges us "to deflate the claims of doubt itself":

"To do as one Hindu master said: ‘Turn the dogs of doubt on doubt itself, to unmask cynicism, and to uncover what fear, despair, hopelessness, and tired conditioning it springs from.’ Then doubt would no longer be an obstacle, but a door to realization, and whenever doubt appeared in the mind, a seeker would welcome it as a means of going deeper into the truth."

Don’t be taken in by the "cool" kind of modern cynicism, which is really just indolence, confusion and resignation posing as worldliness, wit and intelligence. Avoid despair. Learn to be happy and live a fulfilling life. And realize that it is faith – springing from "good doubt" and grounded in reasoned conviction — that can set you free.

"A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible." – Mary McLeod Bethune

Shraddha is usually rendered as "faith", "trust", or "confidence". It is derived from the combination of the word shrad- (a derivative of hrid, "heart") with the verbal root dha-, "to put, place". The combination thus literally means "putting your heart into it", i.e., having a heart-felt belief that something is true.

Hrid is traced back to the Indo-European kerd-, both meaning "heart" which is itself a cognate. Other related English words include "cardiac and "cardio-" (from the Greek kardia) and "cordial", "courage", and "accord" (from the Latin cord-). More English terms come to us through the Latin cognate credere, “to believe”: "credence", "credible", "credo", "credit", and "credulous".

So "having faith" is also "to believe in". As Emerson says above, it’s not a matter of whether one has faith or believes; it’s in what one has faith and belief.

Awesome New Text Messaging Service of the Month

Many thanks to Kelly Morris for launching a new service whereby you can be reminded to check your Buddhist vows throughout the day via a text message sent to your phone. Even if you haven’t taken vows, this is a great way to stay mindful of your morality all day long. Check it out:

http://thevowproject.com/

These questions about karma were sent in by David Simmons:

Why does karma work?  I understand that karma itself is a projection.  But why is it that it seems to work with some consistency? . . . Why does a "good" act elicit a "good" flowering, and vise versa?  If karma is coming from us, why should this be a "law?" Why does it not vary from one point of perception to another?  Certainly many people looking at the world would argue that it does. . . .   Obviously, even with my kindergarten understanding of emptiness I know that the concepts of good or evil are themselves projections which vary from person to person, but why then should there be any negative karmic effect for someone who truly doesn’t believe a bad result would rise from their bad act, or vice versa?   

Thanks for these great questions, David. On the one hand, we are taught that everything is empty of having any self-existence. Therefore everything is projected or imputed by us and nothing is coming from its own side — and this very much includes the workings of karma itself. On the other hand, we are told that the workings of karma are definite and unfailing. Indeed, a strong disbelief in karma and rebirth (the latter being an integral part of a truly coherent conception of karma) is regarded as a classical instance of the most important of the ten major misdeeds: wrong view.

Karma, it would seem, is both relative (in that it, like everything else, is a subjective projection and is not happening "out there") and absolute (in that its workings are fixed and invariable – good acts always bring desirable results, and vice versa — and this despite any particular individual’s "belief" or "non-belief" in karma).

And this actually is the case. Karma is indeed empty of self-existence, but that certainly doesn’t mean karma doesn’t work! Things that exist dependently (which is what is meant by "empty"— they do not exist independently) work just fine. In fact, if things weren’t empty of self-existence, they wouldn’t work at all! Things that had independent essences could never change, and therefore could never "do" anything.

Belief in karma is irrelevant to its functionality. People who don’t believe in karma are just as subject to its laws as those who do – just like the fact that things are empty of unchanging essences or independent existence remains true whether or not any given individual believes it or not.

So karma works, but it doesn’t work independently or self-existently. Karma, like everything else, exists and works only dependently. But on what does karma depend to work like it does? It cannot be belief in the workings of karma in general, for as we have seen karma works whether or not people believe in it.

Belief does, however, play a role in the particulars of how karma works. A person who truly believes they are acting out of selflessness, altruism, compassion, and love – regardless of what they actually do or say – will receive a beneficial result due to the good intention. But if the act itself is seen to be harmful to others, then that part of this same karmic event will entail a negative effect for the doer, regardless of intention.

Every karmic act is mixed; none is purely "bad" or "good". Even at the level of intention, no act done by normal living beings is devoid of at least some selfishness and thus at least some negativity. If the predominant intention or belief is that one’s act is “good” (again, in the sense of being selfless, kind, and in the interest of others), that makes one kind of impression on one’s consciousness. But if one is cognizant (even just peripherally or subconsciously) that the act seems to harm another, that awareness also leaves a karmic imprint on one’s mind. The former impression will cause one to have the subsequent experience of others trying to help or be kind; the latter will result in an experience of injury or unpleasantness.

Why karma works the way it does ultimately requires us to wrestle with the interdependent nature of subject and object. We cannot know ourselves as subjects without objects with whom we see ourselves interact; and there are no knowable objects in our world until and unless we are interacting with them. We experience ourselves as we do because of what we’ve seen ourselves do to others. But also and simultaneously, we experience others the way we do because of who we think we are.

If you think about this a bit, perhaps you’ll get a sense of why the workings of karma are invariable and nevertheless dependently existing. But after having contemplated things, as we go through our daily lives maybe it’s enough just to remember "what goes around comes around" and leave it at that!

For free weekly Lama Marut videocasts and audio podcasts in iTunes, search "Lama Marut" in the iTunes Store, or download audio podcasts from aci-la.org:

> http://www.aci-la.org/mg-podcasts.html

FULL-LENGTH AUDIO

Check the "Download Teachings" section on www.aci-la.org for the hugely popular "Happiness Revolution" talks at the Three Jewels in Tucson, Arizona. Venerable Marut’s three teachings focused on how to change the past through learning forgiveness, how to control the future through gaining trust, and how to be happy here and now. In June, Lama Marut also traveled to Melbourne, Australia to teach on the "Yoga of a Good Heart", including a wonderful meditation on compassion.

> http://www.aci-la.org/teach_marut_recent.html

LIVE VIDEO WEBCASTS

"The Happiness Revolution" at the Three Jewels, Tucson, has been retroactively put up online! Click on the link below to watch the archives.
The Happiness Revolution, June, 2009 from The Three Jewels, Tucson
> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/happiness-revolution

Latest Archived Shows:
"The Teachings of Jesus and the Buddha"
Originally streamed on April 28, 29 and 30 from Cape Ann, Massachusetts:
>http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jesus-and-the-buddha
Originally streamed on May 27, from the Mahasukha Center, LA:
>http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jesusandthebuddha

"Jump-Starting Your Practice: Advices on How to Cultivate Joyful Effort."
Originally streamed on May 25 and 26, from the Mahasukha Center, LA:
>http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lamamarutvirya

For Lama Marut’s live channel on ustream, go here:
> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lama-marut

For all of Lama Marut’s archived videos on ustream.tv go here:

> http://www.ustream.tv/discovery/channel/all?q=marut

Help the Mahasukha Kula Great Retreat Fund

NEW DESIGNS at CafePress!!
Thanks to the generosity and talent of the wonderful designer Olivia Nguyen (who, by the way, designed the beautiful wisdom and compassion wings and "Wisdom is Bliss" t-shirts we see being worn all over the country!) we have a whole new set of designs in our CafePress store.

Inspired by the upcoming Windhover retreat on "Grace, Devotion and Surrender: Meditations on meeting and becoming the Divine", Olivia has created designs for t-shirts, stickers, bags, cups and more focused around the three themes of grace, devotion and surrender.

Please check them out! All profits go directly into the retreat fund:
> http://www.cafepress.com/lamamarut

If you’re interested in earning more about our journey to retreat, please visit:
>http://www.aci-la.org/retreat

Volunteer Opportunities

Join Team Marut!
Please join our ever-expanding group of volunteers who generously offer their time and skills to our various Dharma projects. If you have a flair for flier design, or enjoy being creative with marketing and publicity; if you’re excited about HTML or XML coding; if you have mastered the deep art of web optimization; if you love the teachings so much you wish to transcribe them word-for word; then please contact us at:

> info.lamamarut@gmail.com

For a more extensive list of our Dharma projects and volunteer opportunities, please visit:
>http://thousandarms.wordpress.com/

Online Communities

Join Lama Marut’s pages on:

Facebook:

> http://www.facebook.com/people/Lama-Marut/1008218709

MySpace:

> http://www.myspace.com/lamamarut

Join 700 others who are now receiving daily inspirational messages from Lama Marut sent directly to your phone as a text message!  To get your daily dharma fix, just create a profile at www.twitter.com and then text "follow LamaMarut" to 40404 from your phone. 

Upcoming teachings

Lake Tahoe, Nevada:

Sept. 4-7
Teacher Training program for Zuda Yoga (open to the public, drop-ins invited)
Location: Camp Galilee, Lake Tahoe, Nevada
Contact: Anne-Marie Kramer: amk@zudayoga.com

Reno, Nevada:

Sept. 8 & 9, 3:00-5:00 PM
“Explorations in Emptiness”
Location: The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northern Nevada, 780 Del Monte Lane, Reno Nevada
Contact: Beverle Deerfoot: ayyajaya@sbcglobal.net

Sept. 8 & 9, 7:00-9:00 PM
"The Happiness Revolution: Ancient Techniques for Radical Transformation in a Post-Consumerist Age"
Location: Reno, Nevada
Contact: Beverle Deerfoot: ayyajaya@sbcglobal.net

Sept. 9, 12:30-2:30 PM
"The Missing Teachings of Yoga"
Location: The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Northern Nevada, 780 Del Monte Lane, Reno, Nevada
Contact: Beverle Deerfoot: ayyajaya@sbcglobal.net

Don’t Miss the East Coast "Festival of Bliss", Sept. 25-Oct. 1

New York City:

Sept. 25 & 27, 7:30-9:30 PM
"Killing Anger: Chapter Six of Master Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life"

Location: Lucky Lotus, 184 Dekalb, Brooklyn, NYC
Contact: Ava Gerber: info@luckylotusyoga.com

Sept. 26, 7:30-9:30 PM
"Explorations in Emptiness: Why the World Can’t Be ‘Out There’”"
Location: Go Yoga, Brooklyn, NYC
Contact: Nichole Nichols: nicholsyoga@yahoo.com

New Jersey:

Sept. 29, 7:00-9:00 PM
"The Six Perfections"
Location: Lotus Yoga, 7 North Willow, Suite 3, Montclair, NJ

Contact: Jennifer Kohl: jenniferkohl@aol.com

Sept. 30, 7:00-9:00 PM
"The Happiness Revolution: Ancient Techniques for Radical Transformation"
Location: Montclair State University, 1 Normal Avenue, Montclair, NJ
Contact: Jennifer Kohl: jenniferkohl@aol.com

Oct. 1, 3:00-5:00 PM
"Completing Your Yoga: Cultivating a Daily Meditation Practice"
Location: Sacred Spaces Yoga, 325 Main Street, Metuchen, New Jersey
Contact: Michele Milevoi: earthshinemama@mac.com or Evelyn Lisojo: evelyn@mysacredyoga.com

Oct. 1, 7:00-9:00 PM
"How Yoga Works"
Location: Sacred Spaces Yoga, 325 Main Street, Metuchen, New Jersey
Contact: Michele Milevoi: earthshinemama@mac.com or Evelyn Lisojo: evelyn@mysacredyoga.com

Please Join Us for a Special Retreat at Beautiful Lake Tahoe

Zephyr Cove, Nevada:

November 26-29
Fourth Annual Thanksgiving Group Retreat: "Blissful Path to Bliss"
Location: Zephyr Point Presbyterian Conference Center, 660 Highway 50, Zephyr Cove, NV
Contact: David Fishman: davidbfishman@gmail.com

For more information please visit:
>http://lamamarut.org/?page_id=467

Registration at the Yoga Studies Institute:
> http://yogastudiesinstitute.org/?news&id=186

July, 2009

"Living Simply and Happily "

Here’s the third edition of our bi-monthly “Dharma in the Media” newsletters. Many of the items below deal in one way or another with the theme of learning to live more simply and sanely. As Pico Iyer says in one of the “News Stories of the Month,” “If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies.”

Thanks to Lauren Benjamin for sending the following article by Pico Iyer that appeared on the "Opinion" page of June 13th’s New York Times under the title "The Joy of Less".

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. "There is nothing either good or bad", I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so". I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or "Walden", the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in "Portrait of a Lady", "who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination". Living in the future tense never did that for me.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

Source: "http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/?emc=eta1"

Scott Finkelstein sent in the link to this article, “The Rigors of Life Unplugged,” written by Steve Lopez and published in the May 6, 2009, edition of the L.A. Times:

Cesar Rodriguez knew he was addicted to electronic devices. But the Los Angeles 10th-grader had no idea just how sick he was.

"I can’t stand it," he wrote in his journal on the second day of a one-week attempt to survive without television, iPods, cellphones, BlackBerrys and computers. "I woke up last night but I was still kind of asleep and I was having a dream about my phone and I started to bang my head against the pillow. I AM GOING CRAZY!!!"

On Tuesday, which happened to be day seven of the great experiment, I visited the still-shaky Rodriguez and the rest of Shannon Meyer’s unplugged homeroom students at their downtown charter, the California Academy for Liberal Studies Early College High School.

Detox hasn’t been easy for these BlackBerry babies. They were born into a digital world of wireless links, with headphones where their ears should have been. Meyer, trying to teach them something about true connectedness and solitary reflection, asked them to go cold turkey and take notes. With pen and paper.

Midway through the experiment, Meyer — who is of the radical opinion that students and others should spend less time with electronic gadgets and more time reading old-fashioned newspapers — had e-mailed me a progress report.

"We are all going crazy," she said. It seemed to me a little unsporting that she was e-mailing me despite having joined in the media fast herself, but she explained that she was making an exception only to answer work-related e-mails. As to the upside: "I think some of the kids have discovered they have younger brothers and sisters," she wrote.

Andres Lopez told me he’d been so bored he went to a barber and had his shaggy locks shorn, "Just to fill the void."

Jose Alvarez said he had tried Pilates and something even more exotic: "I cleaned my room."

Mario Canaba was turned so upside down, he actually played with some of his mother’s day-care kids, but described the experience in a single word: "Painful."

Angie Gaytan lost track of the days and had a strange episode of disorientation in which she found herself staring at a piece of chicken.

"I felt weird and out of order," Valerie Lira wrote in describing the experience of waking up and not turning on the television.

Rodriguez, confessing the media fast was "the hardest thing I have ever had to do," drank a lot of water, like a man trying to make it across a desert. At his lowest point, trying desperately to kill time, he accidentally broke a lamp.

"I was playing soccer in my living room," he said.

Nine of the 22 students raised a hand when I asked for confessions from those who had cracked at least once. Of those nine, most transgressions were not premeditated. Some reached without thinking for iPhones, or they checked text messages — especially early in the week — like worms that keep wiggling after being separated from their heads.

Jesus Alonzo was entirely up-front about the moment he broke. He was at a cousin’s house, he said, when the championship boxing match between Manny Pacquiao and Ricky Hatton flashed onto the TV screen.

"Then I cracked," Alonzo wrote in his journal. "I had to watch the fight. It was a short fight, though."

Kim Figueroa’s surrender wasn’t pretty either.

"I was left alone," she said of the predicament she found herself in at home, no relatives around, deafening silence, the walls closing in.

Without a trace of guilt, she reached for the remote and clicked on the TV. And once she was under the spell of that pulsing blue haze, she couldn’t turn back.

So what did Figueroa learn about herself?

"I have almost no self-control," she said unapologetically.

Centuries from now, however, anthropologists will look back on this experiment in human suffering and note some significant breakthroughs.

Daniel Romero read a book for the first time this year.

Lopez actually communicated with an uncle during a rare conversation about swine flu, politics and history.

Jenny Corona connected with her autistic brother, and, to her utter amazement, read an entire Harry Potter book in four days.

Without her headphones blocking out the real world, Flor Salvador heard strange chirping sounds.

"I didn’t know we had birds!" she wrote in her journal.

Meyer, who might have had ulterior motives all along, said she found that the quality of her students’ homework vastly improved. No one suffered any illusions about what would happen when the deadline passed at midnight Tuesday.

Some of the students planned to stay up to listen to music, watch TV or text their friends.

But others said that without constant stimulation, they felt as though they were more in touch with themselves and the world around them, and Lopez said he intended to voluntarily do a one-day media fast each week.

When I visited class a week earlier, Jamila Mohedano thought she’d be the first to crack.

Like several classmates, she said her family’s meals were eaten around a television, and she’d have to lock herself in a room to avoid temptation.

So how’d she do?

There were some "anxious and nervous" moments at first, but the rest of the household agreed to at least turn the television sound off at dinner, and Mohedano gradually gave in to a slower rhythm.

"Reading in absolute silence is pleasant," she wrote in a 10 p.m. journal entry. "I can hear the crickets outside and the wind blow."

Source: "http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez6-2009may06,0,6709880.column"

This article, entitled “TV, Internet and Mobile Usage in U.S. Keeps Increasing, Says Nielsen,” is dated Feb. 23, 2008:

"http://www.nielsen.com/" The Nielsen Company reported that viewing of video on television, Internet and mobile devices – the Three Screens – continues to increase and has reached new heights. In its fourth quarter "A2/M2 Three Screen Report", Nielsen reported that the average American watches more than 151 hours of TV per month, an all-time high. Meanwhile, Americans who watch video over the Internet consume another 3 hours of online video per month and those who use mobile video watch nearly 4 hours per month on mobile phones and other devices.

Nielsen also reported that digital video recorded (DVR) and other timeshifted television is watched at double the pace as video online at 7 hours, 11 minutes per month. Yet in a potential indicator of how audiences could timeshift in the future, young adults (age 18-24) watch video on the Internet and on a DVR at the same rate — about 5 hours per month.

The full "A2M2 Three Screen Report" is available at "http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire".

"The American fascination with television and other video content is not easing up, as consumers keep turning to TV, Internet and Mobile at record levels," said Susan Whiting, vice chair of The Nielsen Company. "Viewers appear to be choosing the best screen available for their video consumption, weighing a variety of factors, including convenience, quality and access. It is clear that TV remains the main vehicle for viewing video, although online and mobile platforms are an increasingly important complement to live home-based television."

Other notable facts from the report include:

Except for the teenage years, viewing of traditional television increases with age; the use of video on the Internet peaks among young adults while viewing mobile video is highest in the teen years.

Men continue to watch video on mobile phones more than women, and women continue to watch video on the Internet and television more than men.

The work day continues to be the primetime for Internet video. Weekdays outpace weekends for online video viewing with 65% of online video viewers streaming content between 9am – 5pm Monday through Friday, versus 51% of online video viewers logging on between 6am – 8pm on weekends.

Nielsen 4Q08 data shows that mobile video has grown, up to 11 million Americans, an increase of 9% versus the previous quarter. Much of this growth can be attributed to increased mobile content and the rise of the mobile web as a viewing option. In addition, the average monthly time spent viewing mobile video among reported mobile video users increased 2%, from 3:37 to 3:42 between 3Q 2008 and 4Q 2008.

The TV and Internet figures are calculated using Nielsen’s National TV and Internet panels which are measured electronically and reported on a regular basis. The Mobile phone figures are collected by Nielsen via a quarterly survey, and give a firsthand look at how early adopters report their usage of mobile video.

Source: "http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/nielsenmediaresearch/37163/"

Jessica Sporn and others have sent me the link to this YouTube video called “The Story of Stuff”:

"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8"

Thanks to Lauren Benjamin for turning us on to this blog run by the New York Times called “Happy Days.” The editors describe it in this way: “Happy Days is a discussion about the search for contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical, spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the lives they lead.”

"http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/"

Bill Harani sent in the following recommendation of a book on cognitive science that reminded him of Buddhist emptiness theory. Bill says that “it has helped to soften my grasping to self.”

 The Embodied Mind : Cognitive Science and Human Experience , by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

Jayla K. wrote in to say, "I noticed a new section [in the May, 2009, newsletter] – Scary Consumer Product of the Month! I propose that the consumer product I have here is even scarier than the treadmill-computer workstation frankenstein-esque monster you featured this month".

Yes, Jayla, you’re right. The link you sent to the "Sensory Assault Alarm Clock" is indeed scarier! The manufacturer’s description says it all: "This jarring alarm clock uses high-decibel sound, flashing light, and a bed-shaking vibration pad to wake even the soundest of sleepers. About as loud as an idling bulldozer, the 85dB alarm prevents the most stubborn dozers from extending their slumber. The alarm clock connects to a lamp and automatically turns the light on and off in tandem with the alarm. A vibrating pad can be placed under a mattress or pillow and provides an insistent, bed-shaking tremor that serves as the last line of defense against oversleeping".

As Jayla says, "After reading the description, I imagine it would be like waking up to some kind of serious earthquake emergency every morning". For people who are really not interested in living calm, peaceful, happy lives!!!

"http://www.hammacher.com/publish/76450.asp"

^ Top

Thanks to John Calabria for recommending this Tibetan singing bowl iPhone app, rated by the L.A. Times as one of the "top 5 iPhone apps for chilling out":

"http://www.oceanhousemedia.com/products/bowls/"

"http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/mailstory-clickthru/296717.php"

(This link requires you to sign up for the Arizona Star.)

^ Top

Check the "Recent Teachings" section on www.aci-la.org for our latest offerings of downloadable audio from Lama Marut. Another visit to LA’s Mahasukha Center saw some wonderful teachings on "Joyful Effort," from Master Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. Lama Marut also offered a popular class on "The Spiritual Teachings of Jesus and the Buddha." A big turnout of 80 or so people came to learn how to meditate on the "Yoga of the Good Heart" in Melbourne, Australia. And a huge crowd of Tucson locals joined us for the marvelous three-part series on "The Happiness Revolution," where we learned how to change the past, control the future and be happy here and now. The full length audio of all these teachings can be found here:

"http://www.aci-la.org/teach_marut_recent.html"

Some of the above teachings were videocast live and are now archived on ustream.tv:

Jump-Starting Your Practice: Joyful Effort

> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lamamarutvirya

The Spiritual Teachings of Jesus and the Buddha

> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jesusandthebuddha

The Happiness Revolution

> http://www.aci-la.org/teach_marut_recent.html

For Lama Marut’s live channel go here:

"http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lama-marut"

Join the thousands (literally!) who are downloading free weekly Lama Marut videocasts and audio podcasts! The latest audio podcasts focus on what vows are and why they are an integral part of living a happier life, and we’ve also included a lovely selection of Guru Yoga podcasts taken from the "Match Made in Heaven" retreat during Thanksgiving 2008. (For information on the 2009 Thanksgiving Retreat, "Blissful Path to Bliss," > Click Here ( http://www.lamamarut.org/?page_id=467))

Latest video podcasts focus on the importance of meditation in the development of our wisdom, and inspire us to be "Spiritual Warriors" in our practice.

To download podcasts, go to iTunes and search “Lama Marut” in the iTunes Store, or download audio podcasts from aci-la.org:  "http://www.aci-la.org/mg-podcasts.html"

Twitter Into Happiness

Just sign up at www.twitter.com and then text "follow LamaMarut" to 40404 from your phone.  You’ll get daily inspirational thoughts sent to your phone as text messages.

Join our “Thousand Arms” team!

Thank you to all of you who have volunteered to help with the many and growing projects that help us reach out to more and more people.  Service is a wonderful way to stay connected to the Dharma, to help others have access to the teachings, and to create the karma for spiritual teachers and teachings to remain in your life.

Please join our ever-expanding group of volunteers who generously offer their time and skills to our various Dharma projects. If you have a flair for flier design, or enjoy being creative with marketing and publicity; if you’re excited about HTML or XML coding; if you have mastered the deep art of web optimization; if you love the teachings so much you wish to transcribe them word-for word; then please contact us at:

> info.lamamarut@gmail.com

For a more extensive list of our Dharma projects and volunteer opportunities, please visit:

> http://thousandarms.wordpress.com/

Help the Retreat Fund!

If you’re interested in learning more about our plans for a Great Retreat beginning in the fall of 2010, please visit:

http://www.aci-la.org/retreat

Help us by shopping! T-shirts, stickers, bags and much, much more, all with distinctive quotes and professional designs, and new stuff added all the time. A percentage of every one of these items will go directly into the retreat fund:

http://www.cafepress.com/lamamarut

Featured Retreats:

Please consider joinng us on the east and west coasts for retreats with Lama Marut:

AUGUST 24-30, Windhover Retreat in Cape Ann, Massachusetts: “Grace, Devotion and Surrender: Meditations on Meeting and Becoming the Divine.”

Buddha said it’s possible for us to be truly happy. All we have to do is give up the idea that it’s not.  

The statement itself is brilliant, but how can this be done?

With the guidance of a teacher, we can soften and surrender.  When we give up our unhappiness, grace arises on its own.

In the rustic setting of beautiful Cape Ann, Mass. this week of powerful teachings and meditations will show us how to let go of the limits we place on ourselves.

With these practices we can change our lives.

> Click here for more (http://retreatatwindhover.com/)

NOVEMBER 26-29, Thanksgiving Retreat in Lake Tahoe, Nevada: “Blissful Path to Bliss.”

Become a part of this great retreat tradition on the shores of the beautiful Lake Tahoe.  This year we are going through "De Lam, Steps of the Path to Bliss."  Experiencing the Lam Rim of His Holiness the First Panchen Lama (1570-1662)

> Click here for more (http://www.lamamarut.org/?page_id=467)

"News and ‘Olds’"

We in the modern world are fascinated by the "news" – recent discoveries and the latest innovations. But in religion, there is really nothing new to be said. There’s no "news", it’s all just all "olds". And from the spiritual point of view, nothing is both "new" and "improved". What is true has been time-tested and does not change with the latest findings of the "experts". What is really true is not in need of improving.

In this issue, we explore some of the ways that recent developments in the secular world can lead us back to the time-honored truths of our spiritual path – and perhaps give us a greater appreciation of them by way of comparison.

Please email us at lama marut@aci-la.org with recommendations for news stories, on-line videos, dharma books that you have found helpful, relevant websites, or anything else you’d like to share.

Pouring Old Wine Into New Bottles

As students and practitioners of religion, it is interesting to observe the ways modern secular culture re-invents the wheel, discovering for itself — often with the publicity and fanfare that accompanies such pioneering "breakthroughs" — what religious traditions have been teaching for millennia. The old wine of religious truth is (mostly unconsciously and unknowingly) being poured into the new wineskins of secular, scientific discourse.

While it is amusing to witness this somewhat narcissistic and myopic process at work among our secular scientists, scholars, and intellectuals, the fact that it is happening can also be a powerful reinforcement of our spiritual practice. The ways in which secular culture in at least some respects corroborates the teachings of religion makes things a bit less complicated for the religious practitioner. It is easier to have support from the society in which we live than not. When the "news" issuing forth from the worldly experts conforms to the "olds" – the truth religions have always been teaching – it can serve to reinforce our belief in our spiritual path.

And perhaps even more than this, the exercise can demonstrate to us that the methods and systems for happiness in the authentic religious traditions of humankind are far more comprehensive and effective than their more recent shadowy counterparts. Why settle for the new when you could have the old?

It’s been twenty-five years since Fritjof Capra published his Tao of Physics, outlining to a general public the parallels between the findings of modern physics and the ancient metaphysical assumptions of many Eastern religions. Books like Gary Zukov’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters and films like What the Bleep Do We Know further popularized the modern realization of a traditional understanding: that we are not just passive eyewitnesses to an independently existing world around us. We are, rather, active participants in the very creation of our world and the events occurring within it. Trends in other parts of the modern academy (sometimes lumped together as "post-modernism") reinforced the idea that we are (at the very least) subjective interpreters — if not full-on projectors — of reality, and not just objective observers of it.

The things and events of our world are coming from us, not at us; nothing exists independently and objectively, but only interdependently. This is a profound and ancient truth — rediscovered of late in a variety of departments within the modern, secular academy – and has radical implications for what happens when the subjective apparatus through which we interpret (or project) the world is changed, and how to manipulate that process through what we call "karma".

An even more recent example of this phenomenon of rediscovery of ancient truths by our modern researchers is in the burgeoning new field of "positive psychology" (a.k.a. "happiness studies"). The best-selling book lists are flooded with the popularized “news” issuing forth from the research of academics like Martin E. P. Seligman (Authentic Happiness), Tal Ben-Shahar (Happier), and Richard Layard (Happiness). But when a spiritual practitioner looks at the results of this research, he or she will find only echoes and restatements of what our religious traditions have been teaching all along. True happiness comes not from the selfish pursuit of more money or consumer goods, nor from working endless hours in order to get ahead at the job, nor from more and more holidays and entertainment experiences. It is also not obtained through seeking revenge from those who hurt us, nor from dominating and exploiting those weaker than ourselves. Rather, happiness comes from . . . wait for it . . . are you ready for the "news"? . . . forgiveness, compassion, an altruistic attitude towards others, and a sense of gratitude for the blessings of one’s life.

It’s déjà vu all over again — the old repositioned as the "new and improved," spiritual truisms redeployed as scientific discoveries, old wine poured into new bottles.

Here’s another example. A new disease has been recently diagnosed. It’s called "affluenza" and is defined by PBS (who also broadcasted a one hour documentary on the topic; see http://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/) in the following manner: Af-flu-en-za n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses. 2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream. 3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth. 4. A television program that could change your life.

According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, affluenza is a malaise that afflicts us beneficiaries of consumer capitalism. We got the products but not the happiness we thought would accompany this material prosperity. Australian researchers Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss (Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough) argue that affluenza is bound up over-consumption, "luxury fever," consumer debt, overwork, waste, and harm to the environment. These pressures lead to "psychological disorders, alienation and distress" – i.e., unhappiness.

Hamilton and Denniss also note that a number of their Australian research subjects have responded to affluenza by what the researchers have called "downshifting". In the attempt to be happy, some people have made a conscious decision to "reduce their incomes and place family, friends and contentment above money in determining their life goals".

Indeed, a new post-consumerist trend toward "voluntary simplicity" or "simple living" is all over the internet and bookstores. It is defined by Wikipedia as "a lifestyle characterized by minimizing the ‘more is better’ pursuit of wealth and consumption. Adherents may choose simple living for a variety of personal reasons, such as spirituality, health, increase in ‘quality time’ for family and friends, stress reduction, personal taste or frugality. On one of the many websites dedicated to the voluntary simplicity movement (www.choosingvoluntarysimplicity.com), we learn that "Choosing voluntary simplicity does not have to be a complete lifestyle change all at once," but that "Making just a few small changes in your life can make a major difference". The site goes on to give a list of ways we could start living more simply, and therefore more happily:

• Start by limiting unnecessary purchases. Ask yourself if the item you’re considering is something you will still want a few years down the road… or if it really is something you want or need. If it’s just an impulse purchase, or you were going to buy it because it is the latest trend, maybe you would rather save the money or use it for something else that is more important to you.
• Think carefully about how you are spending your time. Is your life full of activities or scheduled events that are meaningless to you? Frugality of time is sometimes more important than frugality of money. Start doing things that bring you joy and stop doing some of those things that cause you to feel stressed and unhappy.
• Appreciate your family life and enjoy the people you love. Spend time with each member of your family and build strong relationships… make the effort to become a genuine part of each other’s lives.
• Do it yourself and become more self-reliant. Learn skills and teach yourself to fix things.
• Make a connection with nature. A short walk, time spent working in the garden, outdoor activities, or just being outdoors and enjoying the beautiful day that has been given to you can all bring amazing amounts of relaxation and peace of mind.
• Re-think the way you shop for groceries and the foods you eat. The old adage of “you are what you eat” is even more true today. Good nutrition… eating REAL food and a diet as free of preservatives and additives as is possible will help make you healthier and happier.
• Try to find a balance between work and relaxation. Everyone needs some downtime, both physically and emotionally.

These are all fine suggestions for leading a happier life, but do not begin to approach the techniques for obtaining the more pervasive changes a true spiritual life can effect. They are "lite" versions of the real thing. If the genuine article is available to you, why would you choose the knock-off?

And, arguably, since they’ve had millennia to work on it, they have done so in a much more comprehensive manner than recent secular movements can achieve over a period of a few years. If we are interested in a more venerable, time-tested approach to the happy life, we’d do better to pay attention to the the advice religion has always been giving in this regard.

To take just one example, in Je Tsongkapa’s Great Book on the Steps of the Path (Lam Rim Chenmo) we are presented with six guidelines for living a lifestyle conducive to a peaceful, meditative mindset and to attaining the transformative realizations such a mindset brings about. If you’re looking for the principles for truly leading a simple, happy life, you could start with these.

First off, Je Tsongkapa advises us "to do your meditation staying in a place which is conducive for it". Our homes should not be too big or too cluttered with too many possessions. We should establish and reside in an environment that is zen-like in its elegant spareness. Too much external clutter both reflects and reinforces a messy, muddled mind.

Second, our author recommends that we "keep our wants few". The perpetual desire for what we don’t have – aggravated greatly nowadays by the daily bombardment of advertising we endure – keeps our minds in a constant state of turmoil. And the third piece of lifestyle advice is correlative with the second: be satisfied with what you have and what you get. This, in a word, is contentment – or what I call "entry level happiness", one of those spiritual qualities that is its own reward.

The fourth suggestion for living a good, peaceful life conducive to deep meditation and the insights it can bring is "that you give up trying to do too many things". As those attracted to the voluntary simplicity movement have also recognized in their own way, there is virtue in being "unbusy". Busyness is, of course, not about how many things one does in the course of the day, but about the mental attitude one has as one acts and what, exactly, one is busy doing. A spiritual practitioner should be fully occupied in training him- or herself and in helping others – but never with the stress and anxiety of the busyness that ordinarily afflicts many of us. If you’re feeling stressed out in your spiritual practice, you’re not doing a spiritual practice.

Je Tsongkapa’s fifth guideline is again one that all religious traditions have always underlined — the absolute importance of living a good ethical life if one wishes to be happy. This, unfortunately, is not usually emphasized in the modern, secular facsimiles of the older religious verities — including positive psychology and the voluntary simplicity movement, where there is shockingly little attention given to morality as the key to a good life.

Finally, Je Tsongkapa cuts to the bone and says "you should totally rid yourself of the stupid thoughts of desire and the rest":

You meditate on the problems of desire in this life — how it can bring you to death, and to bondage; and you meditate on the problems it brings you in the life after — a birth in the realms of misery, or the like. Or else you can meditate on how each and every one of these pretty things in the suffering cycle of life is going to end; how quickly it disappears; how surely it will be torn from me before very long. Try then to get accustomed to thoughts like this: So why do I find myself caring at all about these things? What use are they for me? Use these to rid yourself of every stupid thought of desire.

Now that’s what I call REAL "voluntary simplicity"! It is the full-on renunciation religions have been teaching for centuries. Just as the traditional teachings on emptiness are deeper and way more useful to our practice than the speculations of modern physics; and just as the all-encompassing religious program of cultivating selflessness and compassion is far more radical and effective than the underdeveloped, shallow, and piecemeal approach of positive psychology; so too are the teachings on renunciation we find in the world’s religions (for it is certainly not just Buddhism that teaches it!), the genuine article when it comes to a real cure for "affluenza".

The new, secular repackaging of religious truth may help some who are, for one reason or another, unable to hear and digest the undiluted version. But Jesus said we shouldn’t try to pour new wine into old bottles — we shouldn’t try to shoehorn the new into the old. And in both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Thomas, the verse concludes like this:

And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘The old is good enough’.

"It has been excellently said by the Teacher of Gods and Men
That among all wealth, contentment is the best.
So be fully content.
If you know contentment,
Even if you possess no wealth, you’ll be perfectly rich.
Good sir, just as those with many possessions have problems,
That isn’t the case with those whose desires are few". – Arya Nagarjuna, Letter to a Friend

"Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, ‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’" – Mark 10.23-25

shauca:

The word this month is shauca, which means "purity". It is related to an Indo-European verbal root that means "to gleam", and brings us the English words "shine", "scintillate", and "incense".

Shauca is the first of five precepts (niyamas)in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and refers to both outer and inner cleanlinesss. Outer cleanliness includes being careful about what you put into your body – what you eat and drink – and watching your actions to make sure they too are pure and clean. Inner purity embraces what we put before our minds and how we think. Putting four and half hours of television per day on average before our minds, for example, is NOT shauca. Cluttering up our lives with busyness, or juggling countless shallow relationships, or junking up our homes with unnecessary possessions, is NOT shauca.

Seeing the world as pure and every being in it as an enlightened Angel, on the other hand, is a way to practice shauca at the highest level.

Thanks to John Calabria for sending in the image below:

The following question was sent in by Mira Bai Fairlight:

Please tell me the perspective of the teachings on euthanasia (human and animal.)  It is one area I have not been able to resolve for myself in my limited Tibetan Buddhist studies so far.

Thank you for your question, Mira. Euthanasia, also known as “mercy killing” (when involuntary) or “assisted suicide” (when voluntary) comes from the Greek meaning “good death.” In the Buddhist case, at one level, you could say that it is a contradiction in terms to talk about a “good death.” The Buddha clearly identified death as one of the four main reasons that life is suffering (the other culprits being birth, old age, and sickness). The ultimate purpose of a spiritual practice is to gain liberation from suffering – which also entails transcending our very mortality. The ultimately successful religious life would result in NEITHER a “good” or “bad” death!

 At another level, there is no getting around the fact that euthanasia involves putting an end to life. Euthanizing either a human being or an animal is a form of killing a living being (when involuntary) or assisting another’s suicide (when voluntary) – and in both cases is, in and of itself, a negative karma. Seeing your own or another’s life come to an end as a result of your action (whether the action is taken directly or by a veterinarian or medical doctor you have employed to do the act for you) leaves a negative karmic impression on your consciousness.

 But as with all karmic acts, intention plays a huge role. If one is interested in euthanizing the declining person or animal because they have become a financial burden and/or a psychological or social inconvenience to you, then it is not that much different from the euthanasia practiced by the Nazis in order to rid society of handicapped people and those with severe psychiatric problems – which opened the door to the later extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and gay people.

We should respect life in all its forms and avoid putting ourselves in positions where we are judging who deserves to live and who doesn’t.

 But if one is fully convinced both that the person or animal is in great pain and would be relieved of that pain as a result of the “mercy killing,” then it is a compassionate intention driving the act. With such an intention motivating the act, the karma collected by killing is mitigated, or perhaps even offset, by the karma created by such a compassionate mindset.

 If one truly is convinced that euthanasia will end the suffering of another being, one should also be willing to “take the karmic hit” of killing upon themselves out of deep and selfless compassion for the other. But if we are not willing to do so, then perhaps we should avoid such acts altogether.

New Video and Audio Teachings Available On-Line

PODCASTS

For free weekly Lama Marut videocasts and audio podcasts in iTunes, search "Lama Marut" in the iTunes Store, or download audio podcasts from aci-la.org:

> http://www.aci-la.org/mg-podcasts.html

AUDIO

Check the "Recent Teachings" section on www.aci-la.org for Lama Marut’s latest visit to LA’s Mahasukha Center, where he taught on how to jump-start your practice with "joyful effort". At Mahasukha and also in Cape Ann, Lama Marut spoke on “The Spiritual Teachings of Jesus and The Buddha.” And check out his Karmic Management seminar in Munich, Germany!

> http://www.aci-la.org/teach_marut_recent.html

LIVE VIDEO WEBCASTS

Our latest online webcasts have beamed out from the east and west coasts on “The Spiritual Teachings of Jesus and The Buddha.” Click on the links below to watch the archives.

Originally streamed on April 28, 29 and 30 from Cape Ann, Massachusetts:

> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jesus-and-the-buddha

Originally streamed on May 27, from the Mahasukha Center, LA:

> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jesusandthebuddha

Lama Marut also taught two evenings on “Jump-Starting Your Practice: Advices on How to Cultivate Joyful Effort.”

Originally streamed on May 25 and 26, from the Mahasukha Center, LA:

> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lamamarutvirya

For Lama Marut’s live channel on ustream, go here:

> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lama-marut

 For all of Lama Marut’s archived videos on ustream.tv go here:

> http://www.ustream.tv/discovery/channel/all?q=marut

How You Can Help

Join Team Marut!

Please join our ever-expanding group of volunteers who generously offer their time and skills to our various Dharma projects. If you have a flair for flier design, or enjoy being creative with marketing and publicity; if you’re excited about HTML or XML coding; if you have mastered the deep art of web optimization; if you love the teachings so much you wish to transcribe them word-for word; then please contact us at:

> info.lamamarut@gmail.com

For a more extensive list of our Dharma projects and volunteer opportunities, please visit:

• http://thousandarms.wordpress.com/

Online Communities

Join Lama Marut’s pages on:

Facebook:

> http://www.facebook.com/people/Lama-Marut/1008218709

MySpace:

> http://www.myspace.com/lamamarut

Join 700 others who are now receiving daily inspirational messages from Lama Marut sent directly to your phone as a text message!  To get your daily dharma fix, just create a profile at www.twitter.com and then text "follow LamaMarut" to 40404 from your phone. 

Don’t Forget:  Buy Cool Stuff and Help the Great Retreat Fund!

Go shopping!  (Bet you never thought you’d hear that from us!)  T-shirts, stickers, bags and much, much more, all with distinctive quotes and professional designs, and new stuff added all the time.  All profits go directly into the retreat fund:
http://www.cafepress.com/lamamarut

And if you’re interested in learning more about our plans for a Great Retreat beginning in the fall of 2010, please visit:
http://www.aci-la.org/retreat.html

Please visit the lamamarut.org gallery and check out images of Lama Marut’s recent teachings:

> http://www.lamamarut.org/?page_id=254

Upcoming teachings

Melbourne, Australia:

June 10, 8:30-10:00pm
“The Yoga of Developing a Good Heart”
Location: Breathing Space Yoga Studio, Prahran, Vic., Australia
Contact: Malcom Clark: malcolmyoga@gmail.com

 Tucson, Arizona: June 14
“Karma and Emptiness,” as part of the YSI Teacher Training Program
Location: Tucson, Arizona

Contact: www.yogastudiesinstitute.com

Wednesdays, June 17, 24, and July 1, 7:30-9:30 PM
“The Happiness Revolution: Ancient Techniques for Radical Transformation”
Location: Three Jewels, 314 E 6th St., Tucson, AZ 85705

Contact: Melissa Mantha: yogini@revmelissa.com

 Cape Ann, Massachusetts:

August 24-30
Fifth Annual Windhover Retreat: “Grace, Devotion, and Surrender: Meditations on Meeting and Becoming the Divine”
Location: Windhover Performing Arts Center, Rockport, Massachusetts


Contact: Windhover Retreat: windretreat@mac.com

May, 2009

“Questioning our Default Settings ”

In this, the second of our bi-monthly "Dharma in the Media" newsletters,
we feature news stories and on-line videos that, in one way or another, challenge us to rethink our
assumptions – about irritating people, scientific truisms such as the "Big Bang" theory, the talents
people have on the basis of their looks, etc.

We can’t trust our instincts, for our natural
inclinations or "default settings" are (until thoroughly retrained) self-centered, unreflective, and just plain ignorant.

Included below are "News Stories of the Month", "On-Line Videos of the Month", "Website of the Month,", "Book of the Month", and a new feature: "Scary Consumer Good of the Month". You’ll also find letters from readers as well as information about the latest on-line and in person teachings and ways you can help the various on-going projects. Enjoy!

Please remember that we need your help for content for the newsletter.
Email us at lamamarut@aci-la.org with recommendations, comments,
observations, etc

The following is excerpted from a commencement address given by David Foster Wallace at the Kenyon College graduation ceremony held on May 21, 2005. Wallace, a brilliant young writer, subsequently committed suicide in September of 2008.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here’s one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.

Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real — you get the idea. But please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue — it’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what’s going on inside me. As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master."

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot
themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home — you haven’t had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job — and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out:

You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I’ve worked really hard all day and I’m starved and tired and I can’t even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth…

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn’t have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you’re "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it’s hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you’re like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat-out won’t want to. But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line — maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible — it just depends on what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default-setting — then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

Thanks to Sara Falugo who bought me the April 2009 issue of ASTRONOMY magazine from which I’ve extracted the following. It’s taken from the lead article entitled "Why the Universe Had No Beginning," by Paul J. Steinhardt. As many of you know, Buddhist philosophy has always regarded the notion of a “first cause” like the Big Bang to be illogical. The article also reminds us that scientific “truth,” unlike time-honored religious principles, is constantly changing and therefore is not a reliable guide for living a good life.

The conventional Big Bang model of the universe says our cosmic origins can be pinned down with remarkable precision. It claims that everything – space, time, matter, and energy – sprang into being some 13.7 billion years ago in a dramatic instant known as the Big Bang.” . . .

Or did it? Could this picture be flawed? Most cosmologists would bristle at this question. They would rise to the Big Bang model’s defense by pointing to the litany of evidence that shows how the cosmos was once hotter and denser and that traces the formation of galaxies and the universe’s large-scale structure. The evidence is both voluminous and detailed. Yet all these data come from events that supposedly occurred 1 or more seconds after the Big Bang. Currently, there is not a shred of empirical evidence or a reliable theory of gravity to inform us about the Big Bang itself. . . .

It appears that the uncertainties and increasing complexity associated with the standard Big Bang model leave room form an alternative theory of the history of the universe. Of course, any such new view must be consistent with existing observations of cosmic evolution.

These thoughts provided some of the motivations that led Cambridge University physicist Neil Turok and me to develop the “cyclic model of the universe.” This radically new proposal offers a different idea of what happened at the Big Bang and a novel vision of our past and future.

According to this model, the universe is endless. It undergoes limitless cycles of expansion and cooling, each of which begins with a Big Bang and ends in a Big Crunch. The event that occurred 13.7 billion years ago is only the most recent bang. Although this moment created the matter contained in everything we see, space, time, and energy existed before the bang. And more Big Bangs await us in the future.

Suemi Atherton passed along the link to this interesting Associated Press story of March 4, 2009, entitled “No iPods for Lent, bishops urge. Bishops urge them to give up cars, MP3 players and more for Lent.”

Roman Catholic bishops in Italy are urging the faithful to go on a high-tech fast for Lent, switching off modern appliances from cars to MP3 players and abstaining from surfing the Web or text messaging until Easter.

The suggestion gives a modern twist to traditional forms of abstinence in the period Christians set aside for fasting and prayer ahead of Easter. And it shows the Church’s increasing focus on the use of technology as well as its perceived abuses.

Dioceses and Catholic groups in Modena, southern Bari and other cities have called for a ban on text messaging every Friday in Lent, which began last week with Ash Wednesday.

"It’s a small way to remember the importance of concrete and not virtual relationships," the Modena diocese said in a statement. "It’s an instrument to remind us that our actions and lifestyles have consequences in distant countries."

The diocese said the "no SMS day" seeks to draw attention especially to years of conflict in Congo fueled in part by the struggle for control of coltan mines. The mineral is an essential material in cell phones.

The Turin diocese is suggesting the faithful not watch television during Lent. In the northeastern city of Trento the church has set up a "new lifestyles" calendar that proposes different changes in everyday life for each of the period’s five weeks.

Some ideas include: Leave cars at home and hop on a bike or a bus; refrain from throwing chewing-gum on the street and start recycling waste; enjoy the silence of a week without the Internet and iPods. . . .

And where could many of these appeals for abstinence be found? On the Web sites of various dioceses, highlighting the Church’s increasing appreciation of the reach of modern communication even as it remains wary of new media.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29510016/from/ET

This one was viral last month, receiving over 20 million hits on YouTube. Thank you, Irma Gomés and others, for sending this reminder not to judge others based on outer appearances:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=fr&v=9lp0IWv8QZY&gl=FR

Hillary Cole recently heard a podcast where we were urged NOT to follow our instincts (e.g., returning violence with violence) and instead just “do the opposite” (turn the other cheek), and was reminded of this Seinfeld episode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjXUgxR4Z10

 Dushan Zarik writes, "Stumbling around the internet I found this very interesting and cool video about how modern physics is verifying all principle teachings of Buddhism – Emptiness, Interconnectedness and the Nature of Reality. Hope that you’ll find it as interesting as I have. It has definitely been a help with some of us who had a scientific training and conditioning and who still have a lot to work on their Bhakti Yoga".

http://www.vimeo.com/2293696

Thanks to Kate Manfredi for passing on this link to Laura Solomon’s “Only Good News” website, with a nice video on “validation”:

http://onlygoodnews.weebly.com/

Bill Harani sent in the following recommendation of a book on cognitive science that reminded him of Buddhist emptiness theory. Bill says that “it has helped to soften my grasping to self.”

 The Embodied Mind : Cognitive Science and Human Experience , by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

Sara Armstrong found this dystopic gadget on line. For $5000 you can purchase the “Walkstation,” a combination treadmill/work station that “promote(s) healthy habits to sedentary workers by encouraging them to accomplish their projects on this virtually silent, low-speed, commercial grade treadmill.”The manufacturer urges us to “take strides to enhance the productivity, focus and overall health of the workplace with the multitasker’s dream”:

http://www.officedesigns.com/product-exec/product_id/955?cid=14604%5EFeb+Buzz+1%5EEMAIL

^ Top

Thank you for everything you have taught me.  And for the freedom and happiness I have experienced as a result.  Thank you for telling me the truth.   

A long overdue thanks to Lama Marut. . . . I’ve been listening to his teachings (and sharing them with others) for a few years.  Lama Marut: I’ve been all over the internet for a decade looking for teachings of truth, and I always came back to you. Your teachings are simple, direct, true, and of ultimate benefit to all beings.  I’ve experienced great bliss, seen that the pen isn’t really a pen but is really there, and have never been happier in my entire life. Your teachings were one of the planks in my raft and for that I am eternally grateful.  Keep it up, may all beings be freed from suffering!

I have recently finished listening to the Tahoe retreat 2008 teachings — wow, those are just excellent. Please, more of that.

Venerable Marut, I owe you the highest praise and thanks. Your podcasts and classes have been instrumental in guiding me to The Path. I just wanted to let you know how helpful you’ve been, I hope to be able to learn from you in person one day. In the meantime, I’ll keep using the resources you’ve generously provided online.

I’ve been following your podcast teachings for a while now and have found them tremendously helpful. Thank you! Today, I joined twitter to see what you might have posted on there and I was delighted to see all of the aphorisms and quotes you’ve posted.  The one that struck me to the core was this: "A test: Could you die today without regrets?" Wow.  Thank you again!

Lama, you totally rock.  We love you so much and beg you to stay in our lives.  You are extraordinary.  May we begin to be as good as students and teachers as you.   Thank you for all that you are doing.  We would be lost without this lineage and you Buddhas who are unfathomably kind to return and teach, appearing in all forms, who knows how many You are. Please stay, please stay, please stay. 

I love Lama Marut. I have listened to about 6 of his podcasts today and didn’t want to stop after I was out of the car. Looking forward to my 3 hours of driving tomorrow. He rocks!!

^ Top

On the “Recent Teachings” page of the ACI-LA website (www.aci-la.org) you’ll find the audio of three nights of teaching at L.A.’s Mahasukha Center on the Bhagavad Gita, as well as a public talk given in Munich, Germany, and a two night survey of the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha delivered in Cape Ann, Massachusetts:http://www.aci-la.org/teach_marut_recent.html

Many teachings are now being broadcasted and archived on ustream.tv, including the L.A. and Cape Ann talks mentioned above.

The latest shows that were broadcast are:

“The Spiritual Teachings of Jesus and the Buddha” from Cape Ann, Massachusetts: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/jesus-and-the-buddha

“The Three Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita” from the Mahasukha Center, LA: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/The3Yogas

For all archived shows go here: http://www.ustream.tv/search/recorded/all/lama%20marut/most_views/1

For Lama Marut’s live channel go here: htttp://www.ustream.tv/channel/lama- marut

For free weekly Lama Marut videocasts and audio podcasts, go to iTunes and search “Lama Marut” in the iTunes Store, or download audio podcasts from aci-la.org: http://www.aci-la.org/mg-podcasts.html

Twitter Into Happiness

Just sign up at www.twitter.com and then text "follow LamaMarut" to 40404 from your phone.  You’ll get daily inspirational thoughts sent to your phone as text messages.

Join our “Thousand Arms” team!

Check out the > new blog, (thanks to Katie Vergara and Michael Penque) that lists all of the wonderful volunteer projects we have running; from Twitters to transcribing, publicity and our positions vacant, be a part of the growing arms of Avalokiteshvara!

http://thousandarms.wordpress.com/

Calling All Transcribers!

Help us try to reach our goal of having all of Lama Marut’s Bhagavad Gita classes from his Diamond Mountain courses (Karma Yoga, Jnyana Yoga and Bhakti Yoga) transcribed by the first of June.  Be a part of a special project to get these incredible teachings published for your fellow yogis and yoginis!

To volunteer, please email > Carmencita Penaloza

Help the Retreat Fund!

If you’re interested in learning more about our plans for a Great Retreat beginning in the fall of 2010, please visit:

http://www.aci-la.org/retreat

Help us by shopping! T-shirts, stickers, bags and much, much more, all with distinctive quotes and professional designs, and new stuff added all the time. A percentage of every one of these items will go directly into the retreat fund:

http://www.cafepress.com/lamamarut

Rochester, Michigan:

May 1-4, “Hatha Yoga Pradipika IV”

Location: Red Lotus Yoga, Rochester, Michigan

Contact: Brian Granader: Bgranader@aol.com

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

May 5, 7:00-9:00 PM, “The Missing Teachings of Yoga”

Location: Yoga Sutra, 1401 Walnut St, 2nd Floor, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Contact: Floss Barber: fjb@flossbarber.com

Doylestown, Pennsylvania:

May 6-7, 5:00-7:00 PM and 8:00-10:00 PM, “Hatha Yoga Pradipika Essentials”

Location: Doylestown, Pennsylvania

Contact: Amy Cronise-Mead: amy.mead@mac.com

Los Angeles, California:

May 25-26, 7:30-9:30 PM, “Jump-Starting Your Practice: Advice on How to Cultivate Joyful Effort from Master Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life”

Location: Mahasukha Center

Contact: Lauren Benjamin: lauren.benjamin:@aci-la.org

May 27, 7:30-9:30 PM, “The Spiritual Teachings of Jesus and the Buddha”

Location: Mahasukha Center

Contact: Lauren Benjamin: lauren.benjamin:@aci-la.org

Morph ‘n Core

This month we explore a crucial question as Buddhism comes to the West:  what is the core of the Buddha’s teaching, and what is it we need to “morph” as we make Buddhism our own? 

The Buddha’s radical message may sometimes seem a little out of step with certain modern assumptions, but if we in our exuberance to modernize and Westernize Buddhism extract the very heart of the Buddha’s teachings, there will be no real Buddhism left and no real hope for ending our suffering. 

Please email us at lamamarut@aci-la.org with recommendations for news stories, on-line videos, dharma books that you have found helpful, relevant websites, or anything else you’d like to share.

“What Makes You a (Western) Buddhist?”

If Buddhism is going to take root in the West – and in our own lives — we must indigenize it.  Buddhism cannot last here as a foreign religion for more than a generation or two.  If it is to survive here and now, we must Westernize and modernize it.  It is our job to help “morph” Buddhism into a Western religion, just as when it was brought into China, Japan, and Southeast Asia it adapted to those cultures.

Some of the necessary adjustments are obvious.  The traditional Asian patriarchal structure of authority has got to go.  And the exclusion of the laity (as well as nuns) from the highest teachings and practices of Buddha’s dharma will also by necessity need to change as Buddhism comes into a culture where monasticism does not play the same role as it has in Asia.  Buddhism will have to be less sexist and less hierarchical and exclusivist if it is going to take root and play a meaningful role in the modern West.

In addition to these institutional changes, the dharma must also be translated into our own language.  We must put the Buddha’s words into our own words; we must make the Buddha’s teachings speak directly to us.  Part of this translation project, in its largest sense, will involve utilizing modern delivery systems for propagating the dharma: Web sites, podcasts, twitters. . . whatever is at hand!  Buddhism in the West, like pretty much everything else, will have to go digital.

But there is obviously a danger in going too far in the morphing process, of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  In the effort to make it acceptable to modern sensibilities, much of what is presented as Buddhism in the modern West has little resemblance to what the Buddha taught.  If Buddhism is morphed to such an extent that the core is lost, it will no longer be Buddhism at all.

A well-known Western scholar and practitioner, for example, has claimed that one can maintain an agnostic stance towards some of the teachings of the Buddha – that there can be a Buddhism “without beliefs.”  Among the supposedly dispensable tenets is the difficult (for Westerners) doctrine of rebirth.  While agnosticism about rebirth is technically not included, the denial of past and future lives is specifically listed as a classical example of “wrong view” in the scriptures.  And the reason for this is fairly obvious: without factoring in past and future lives, the idea of a karmic law is undermined (for we don’t always “reap what we sow” in this same lifetime), and when that happens the whole edifice of Buddha’s dharma begins to crumble. 

Many of the prominent figures in Western Buddhism interviewed in the popular iTunes podcast series entitled “Buddhist Geeks” seem also to be somewhat embarrassed about what the Buddha actually taught.  Most people would agree that the “Four Noble Truths” encapsulate the core of Buddha’s dharma:  life is suffering, suffering is caused, there is an alternative to suffering, and there is a method for achieving that alternative.  But the notion that one can completely overcome and transcend suffering – defined as “birth, old age, sickness, and death” – is sometimes nowadays replaced with the idea that Buddhism is simply a psychological tool to help us deal better with stress in this life.  Overcome death?  Come on!  Let’s be realistic here!

The Buddha’s claim to perfect enlightenment (the permanent end of suffering and attainment of highest bliss, together with omniscience and the ability to emanate countless clones) has in some segments of Western Buddhism been dismissed as “obviously” impossible.  Or even worse, the goal of Buddhism has seemingly been completely re-envisioned by at least one influential Western teacher who claims to be an “arhat.”  Traditionally, an arhat is someone who has entered nirvana, the state of the permanent cessation of all mental afflictions and the suffering that derives from them.  In this new version of the goal, however, it seems that there can be a nirvana which does not entail the total end of suffering and all mental afflictions (let alone the omniscience and emanation capacity that accompanies the Mahayana idea of enlightenment).  Furthermore, it seems that this goal can be achieved pretty much in one’s spare time:  “I’ve done this stuff while holding down jobs, having relationships, and pursuing graduate studies.  I did it in a few weeks or months of retreat time here and there with a lot of daily practice.  My total retreat time from beginning to arahatship was about 8 months with the longest sit being 27 days.” 

This is an “enlightenment” for modern times: relatively easily and quickly attained, and one with characteristics well within the realm of rational expectation.  I once heard the Dalai Lama berate Westerners for thinking that somehow they could easily and without much effort achieve the same goal the historical Buddha reached only through complete renunciation and years of strict discipline and hard work.  But perhaps His Holiness had not heard that the goal itself was being reinterpreted in such a way that we Westerners could actually achieve it without such sacrifices, toil, and investment of time.

There is thus a trend toward simplification, demythologizing, and “reasonableness” in some sectors of modern, Western Buddhism.  “Let’s be rational here,” these folks seem to say.  “Let’s take what we can accept and just leave behind what appears to be too pre-modern, too unscientific, too difficult to accept.”  And let’s still call what we’re left with “Buddhism.”  While some contemporary Buddhists are regarded as radical for sporting full-body tattoos and multiple piercings while hanging out in punk bars, a more profound counter-cultural statement might be to just adhere to what the Buddha actually taught!

Given all this, it is noteworthy that one of the hippest, savviest, and modern of the Tibetan Buddhist lamas, Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse (director of The Cup and Travellers and Magicians), has recently published a book with the provocative title What Makes You Not a Buddhist.  Without adherence to certain foundational and fundamental teachings of the Buddha, the author claims, it is meaningless to say you are nevertheless somehow a “Buddhist.”  In his book, Khyentse identifies the core of Buddha’s dharma as the so-called “four seals”:  the impermance of all things, the fact of suffering, the doctrine of emptiness and no-self, and the possibility of nirvana or perfect peace.

While I would agree that all four of these propositions are equally important and definitive, it seems that much of the trouble some Western “Buddhists” have with real, hard-core Buddhism centers especially around the third.  For without a true understanding of what emptiness and no-self really mean and entail, much of Buddhism might indeed seem outdated, superstitious, or just plain impossible. 

Without a real sense of what is made possible by the fact that nothing has an inherent and therefore unchangeable essence, one might want to ignore the more radical claims of the Buddha – that death and all other forms of suffering are overcomeable and that the perfection of self and the world is possible.  Buddhism then can be repositioned as a  kind of “inner science” of meditation, or just another psychological or therapeutic technique for stess relief, rather than a full-blown religion with full-blown religious claims.

As Arya Nagarjuna writes, “For the one to whom emptiness is clear, everything is clear.  And for the one for whom emptiness is not clear, nothing is clear.”  If one understands that everything, without exception, is empty, then everything (also without exception) is possible.  But if one’s understanding of emptiness is shallow or limited (thinking, for example, that some things definitely aren’t empty, that mortality, or scientific laws, or human limitations have some kind of essential immutability), then one will soon hit a wall when it comes to the more revolutionary claims of a spiritual teacher like the Buddha.

Emptiness does indeed make everything possible.  Which is why the Buddha was right 2500 years ago in India, and is still is right in the modern West:   Suffering can be overcome.  Full enlightenment is possible.  The world can be transformed into a paradise. 

There is nothing that is not perfectable, because there is nothing that is not not perfectable.  That is the teaching of emptiness.  

And that is, arguably, the core of Buddhism. 

Buddhism can and should be morphed in all kinds of ways, re-presented in modern,Western language and cultural idioms.  But any version of Buddhism that does not incorporate the core of emptiness also does not provide a real alternative to the suffering of samsara.   Anything less than the full embrace of the radical claim that, because everything is empty, all unhappiness can be overcome and total perfection is possible – anything less than that will not do.

Anything less is not Buddhism.

Thanks to Shannon Hayes who sent me this quote (I love the phrase “creative maladjustment!):

“This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed non-conformists. The saving of our world from pending doom will come not from the actions of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a dedicated minority.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

saksha:

The word saksha combines the prefix sa-, which means “with,” with the word aksha, meaning “eye,” which finds its way into the English word “ocular.”  So saksha- means “with one’s very eyes” or “right before your eyes.”

The word appears in a verse from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika on the importance of the guru, which has been translated by Geshe Michael Roach and Lama Christie McNally as follows:   “Suppose you are granted the teaching on the seals (mudras, advanced physical and meditative yogic practices) in the form of a personal instruction.  Then you will know that you’ve found your teacher of shining glory (shri guru), your master (svamin), the god who sits at your side (sakshad ishvara).”

The verse is an important one for understanding the nature and potentiality of the guru – who can be regarded as identical to the divine, to “god” or isvara, and who is also not residing on Alpha Centauri but is rather “right before your eyes.”  The divine is potentially imminent, present in the here and now, because the divine is also empty – that is, the guru is not not divine. 

But you must first open your eyes, and entertain the possibility that there could be more than sometimes meets the eye, so that the divine can truly be seen with your very own eyes.

The following question was sent in by David G. Simmons of Nashville, Tennessee:

What is bothering me is that I am finding it inordinately difficult to shake the nagging feeling that there still ARE some things out there which possess some kind of "essential nature."  I am not necessarily talking about mundane things like an iPod or an ocean, or a sun.  What I’m talking about are deeper things like energy, or benevolence, or compassion itself.  Or pure evil for that matter . . . .

So, finally for my question.  What I want to ask you is, from your perspective of your understanding of your tradition of the teachings of the person we understand to have been the enlightened one, is there anything which is transcendently pervasive and essential in any way?  I’m not talking about a white bearded god.  I’m talking about an essential reason to "do good."  An "essential benevolence."  A deeper "good" which one ties ones karmic efforts to.
 
Because from my perspective it seems that the concept of karma and trying to live a "right thinking" and "right acting" type of life is inexorably linked with some deep sense of "right and wrong."  And this to me seems to unavoidably set up the argument that karma is either merely a convenient illusion used to help maintain relative peace on earth, or an irrefutable implication of something essential beyond emptiness. . . .

 I MUST ask these questions.   Because from a purely intellectual perspective, I find it very hard to distinguish a philosophy where ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING is emptiness, from a purely nihilistic worldview.  

The teaching of the Madhyamika or “Middle Way” school of Buddhist philosophy, regarded as the highest by Tibetan Buddhism, is indeed that everything, without exclusion, is 100% empty of self-existence.  All things or phenomena, the self, and all processes are empty of being anything other than imputations or projections coming from us.  And the projections we have of the world, of ourselves, and of the relationships or processes between things and beings, are what they are because of our karma.  We are forced to perceive everything the way we do because of how we have treated others in the past.

Just because things are empty doesn’t mean they don’t work!  In fact, Nagarjuna argues that it is only BECAUSE things are empty that they can work, for if things had essences they would never change or function.  The “middle way” is between the two extremes of a) thinking that things exist as they appear to (i.e., self-existently, independently, and objectively), and b) thinking that if they don’t exist that way then they don’t exist at all. Arya Nagarjuna states things precisely: “There is nothing whatsoever that does not arise dependently, and thus there is nothing whatsoever that is not empty.”  The world, the self, and processes like karma or causality DO exist and function quite well – but only as projections which arise dependently on karma.

The idea that karma itself is empty is one that hangs up many Buddhists.  In texts like Arya Nagarjuna’s ROOT VERSES ON THE MIDDLE WAY and the ninth chapter of Master Shantideva’s GUIDE TO THE BODHISATTVA’S WAY OF LIFE, voice is given to what must have been a common objection:  if karma itself is also empty, then there is no such thing as morality and causality.  But this presumes that things that are empty don’t exist at all, which is NOT what is being argued. 

As both Nagarjuna and Shantideva insist, there are “two truths” or “two realities” – ultimate reality (which is the emptiness of things) and “deceptive” reality (the reality of the world of appearances).  The latter exists!  Karma exists!  But “deceptively,” meaning that it does not exist as it appears – as a self-existent and automatically working “law of the universe” or some such. 

Karma exists in the same way everything else does: as a projection . . . get ready for it . . . forced upon us by karma!  And there is no karma that exists in any other way than that.  There is NOTHING that exists in any other way than that.

Find the middle way, David!  As Je Tsongkapa says in his text THE THREE PRINCIPAL PATHS, “You’ve yet to realize the thought of the Able as long as two ideas seem to you disparate:  The appearance of things – infallible interdependence – and emptiness – beyond taking any position.”

Subscribe to receive notice of Lama Marut’s live broadcasted teachings

We are trying to bring you live broadcasts through USTREAM of Lama Marut’s teachings whenever and wherever we can! If you’d like to subscribe to an email list that notifies you when we are broadcasting, please subscribe via the box on th right.  It will take you to a list where you can indicate that you would like to receive these occasional blasts.

Sign up to Lama Marut’s Live Video Broadcast List! Email:   Alternatively, just > email us and we’ll add you.

For Lama Marut’s live channel on ustream, go here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lama-marut

Latest teaching at the Mahasukha Center on the Three Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the3yogas

For all archived videos on ustream.tv go here:
http://www.ustream.tv/search/recorded/all/lama%20marut/most_views/1

New Video and Audio Teachings Available On-Line

Check the “Recent Teachings” section on www.aci-la.org for the Diamond Mountain University winter term course, “Meditations on Emptiness”:
http://www.aci-la.org/teach_marut_recent.html

For free weekly Lama Marut videocasts and audio podcasts in iTunes, search “Lama Marut” in the iTunes Store, or download audio podcasts from aci-la.org: http://www.aci-la.org/mg-podcasts.html

Join 500 others who are now receiving daily inspirational messages from Lama Marut sent directly to your phone as a text message!  To get your daily dharma fix, just create a profile at www.twitter.com and then text "follow LamaMarut" to 40404 from your phone. 

Join our “Thousand Arms” team!

Check out the > new blog, (thanks to Katie Vergara and Michael Penque) that lists all of the wonderful volunteer projects we have running; from Twitters to transcribing, publicity and our positions vacant, be a part of the growing arms of Avalokiteshvara!

http://thousandarms.wordpress.com/

Calling All Transcribers!

Help us try to reach our goal of having all of Lama Marut’s Bhagavad Gita classes from his Diamond Mountain courses (Karma Yoga, Jnyana Yoga and Bhakti Yoga) transcribed by the first of June.  Be a part of a special project to get these incredible teachings published for your fellow yogis and yoginis!

To volunteer, please email > Carmencita Penaloza

Don’t Forget:  Buy Cool Stuff and Help the Three Year Retreat Fund!

Go shopping!  (Bet you never thought you’d hear that from us!)  T-shirts, stickers, bags and much, much more, all with distinctive quotes and professional designs, and new stuff added all the time.  A percentage of every one of these items will go directly into the retreat fund:
http://www.cafepress.com/lamamarut

And if you’re interested in learning more about our plans for a Great Retreat beginning in the fall of 2010, please visit:
http://www.aci-la.org/great_retreat.html

Essex, Massachusetts:
April 28-30, 7:30-9:30 PM,
“The Spiritual Teachings of Jesus and the Buddha”

Contact: Phil Salzman: salzman3@comcast.net

Rochester, Michigan:
May 1-4,
Hatha Yoga Pradipika IV
Contact: Brian Granader: Bgranader@aol.com

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:
May 5, 7:30-9:30 PM,
“The Missing Teachings of Yoga”

Contact: Floss Barber: fjb@flossbarber.com

Doylestown, Pennsylvania:
May 6-7, 5:00-7:00, 8:00-10:00 PM,
Hatha Yoga Pradipika Essentials 

Contact: Amy Cronise-Mead: amy.mead@mac.com

Los Angeles, California:
May 25-27, 7:30-9:30pm
Teachings T.B.A
Location: Mahasukha Center, LA
Contact: Lauren Benjamin: lauren.benjamin:@aci-la.org