We’re meditating all wrong, says ‘Buddha from Brooklyn’

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Were meditating all wrong, says Buddha from
Brooklyn

• Lama Surya Das, the "Buddha from Brooklyn," is
  one of a handful of Westerners who have been
  teaching meditation for decades. And, yet, he
  says we're doing it wrong."So many people seem
  to be moving narcissistically conditioned by
  our culture, doubtless into self-centered
  happiness-seeking and quietism, not to mention
  the use of mindfulness for mere effectiveness,"
  he said. True meditation, he said, generates
  wisdom and compassion, which may be very
  disquieting, at least in the short term.

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Born Jeffrey Miller, Surya Das has had a
spiritual journey that is remarkable in its
breadth. He was given the name "Surya Das" by the
Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba, made famous by Ram
Dass more than 40 years ago. But Surya Das
shifted gears in the early 1970s to Tibetan
Buddhism, subsequently completing two three-year
silent meditation retreats and becoming one of
the first Westerners to be authorized as a
Tibetan lama.At the time, meditation was still
considered pretty weird foreign, exotic,
hippie-ish. Now it's everywhere. Meditation
especially mindfulness, which trains the mind to
observe nonjudgmentally and attentively has
gone mainstream. In secular forms, it's now
widespread in health care, education, the
corporate world, even the military. Each year, 1
million Americans take up the practice for the
first time.  Surya Das is not entirely happy
about that.
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"Mindful divorce, mindful parenting, mindful TV,"
he complained. "Why not mindful sniping,
poaching, or mindful waiting to find the
opportunity to take advantage of and exploit
someone when there's a chink in their
armor?"Moreover, he said, because of the way
meditation is taught, many people think they
can't do it. " 'Quiet your mind' or 'calm and
clear your mind' are instructions I hear way too
much. Some teachers actually encourage people to
try to stop thinking, when in fact meditative
awareness means being mindful of thoughts and
feelings, not simply trying to reduce, alter or
white them out and achieve some kind of
oblivion."What's missing? In his new book,
"Make Me One With Everything" (the answer to a
well-worn Buddhist joke
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"What did the  Zen monk say to the hot dog
vendor?"), Surya Das argues for a return to the
original purpose of Buddhist meditation not
relaxation, but liberation. The goal, he said, is
"to genuinely learn how to gain direct access to
Oneness, wholeness, completeness, integration
with all the parts of themselves and life. "All
the parts" is a crucial ingredient. In "Make Me
One," he proposes what he calls "co-meditation"
not trying to find a quiet "moment of Zen" apart
from the messy, noisy world of work, family and
children, but inviting all of the noise into
meditation. That is indeed unorthodox in a
contemporary context. But it is also part of the
ancient Tibetan tradition known as Lojong, which
often features elaborate visualizations not
quieting down and following the breath. Indeed,
many of the book's unusual meditation practices
sky-gazing, gardening, meditation for couples,
and wild neologisms including Presencing,
Convergitation and Momitation are based on
Surya Das' years of studying and translating
esoteric Tibetan teaching tales.
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"It's the same transformative and liberating
essence, yet I think it's pretty new for almost
everyone today," he said. "The anti-intellectual
meditators, thought-swatters and
imagination-suppressors have long ruled
meditation-oriented circles in  the West. But
authentic meditative practices can enhance and
even unleash the creativity and
imagination."One benefit of these practices is
that you don't have to quiet the mind to do them.
"It's helpful for people who think they can't
meditate because they can't sit still and think
less. That ain't the point. Still, bringing
more noise into one's meditation practice is
diametrically opposed to the popular conception
of meditation as calming and quieting. Surya Das
calls that "the old New Age, self-growth,
self-development, self-improvement emphasis
trying to use meditation to get away from it all.
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We need to erode the Grand Canyon-like gulf we
see today between self and others, us and them,
inner and outer, and even body and mind, body and
soul, heaven and hell, liking and disliking, to
realize the great equanimity of what is called in
Tibetan Buddhism One Taste, and what others call
unity vision, oneness, third-eye vision and the
like. Sure you can.There's a refreshing
honesty in this iconoclastic approach. Whatever
awakening is, surely it has something to do with
authenticity. And for some of us, authenticity is
fast-talking, free-associating and full of sound
and fury.Or as Surya Das himself put it, "It
can become obnoxious, I know, but I'm a folksy,
campy, backyard bodhisattva-from-Brooklyn kinda
guy, what can I say?" Article Source
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itating-all-wrong-says-buddha-from-brooklyn