I think they probably mean zazen (or am I nitpicking here?)

People can reduce their sensitivity to pain by thickening their brain, according to a new study published in a special issue of the American Psychological Association journal, Emotion. Researchers from the Université de Montréal made their discovery by comparing the grey matter thickness of Zen meditators and non-meditators. They found evidence that practicing the centuries-old discipline of Zen can reinforce a central brain region (anterior cingulate) that regulates pain.

Science Daily: Zen Meditation: Thicker Brains Fend Off Pain

As a toddler, he was put on a throne and worshipped by monks who treated him like a god. But the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader has caused consternation – and some embarrassment – for Tibetan Buddhists by turning his back on the order that had such high hopes for him.
[...]

According to the foundation biography, another leader suspected Torres was the reincarnation of the recently deceased Lama Yeshe when he was only five months old. In 1986, at 14 months, his parents took him to see the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The toddler was chosen out of nine other candidates and eventually “enthroned”.

Guardian: Boy chosen by Dalai Lama turns back on Buddhist order

(via OVO)

See also: The Shadow of the Dalai Lama.

“The teachings of the Buddha have been variously understood by scholars, monks, and laypeople over the centuries. But what was it that the Buddha actually taught? While this remains an open and oft-debated question, scholar John Peacocke”‘in his work as both an academic and a dharma teacher”‘asserts that by looking to the history, language, and rich philosophical environment of the Buddha’s day we can uncover what is most distinctive and revolutionary about his teachings. Peacocke, who does not shy away from controversy, argues that in some very important ways, later Buddhist schools depart from early core teachings.

Peacocke has been practicing Buddhism since 1970. He was first exposed to Buddhism at monasteries in South India, where he ordained as a monk in the Tibetan tradition. He later studied in Sri Lanka, where Theravada Buddhism has flourished for centuries. Returning to lay life and his native England, Peacocke went on to receive his Ph.D. in Buddhist studies at the University of Warwick. He currently lectures on Buddhist and Hindu thought at the University of Bristol and next year will begin teaching at the Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy Master of Studies program at Oxford University. A former director of the Sharpham Centre for Buddhist Studies in Devon, England, Peacocke also serves on the teaching council at nearby Gaia House, a retreat center offering instruction in a variety of Buddhist traditions. He now teaches and practices in the Vipassana tradition. Tricycle editor James Shaheen visited with Peacocke near Bristol University in April to discuss what the language of the early Pali and Sanskrit texts tells us about Buddhism today.”

(via Tricycle. h/t: H~Log)

Here’s another excerpt from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s new memoir, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky:

Full Story: Reality Sandwich

See also: Arthur’s excerpt from Spiritual Journey

Experienced Zen meditators can clear their minds of distractions more quickly than novices, according to a new brain imaging study.

After being interrupted by a word-recognition task, experienced meditators’ brains returned faster to their pre-interruption condition, researchers at Emory University School of Medicine found.
Giuseppe Pagnoni, PhD, Emory assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and co-workers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine changes in blood flow in the brain when people meditating were interrupted by stimuli designed to mimic the appearance of spontaneous thoughts.

The study compared 12 people from the Atlanta area with more than three years of daily practice in Zen meditation with 12 others who had never practiced meditation.

Full Story: Science Daily

(via OVO)

“Zen anarchy? What could that be ? Some new variations on the koans, those classic proto-Dadaist Zen ‘riddles’? What is the Sound of One Hand making a Clenched Fist? If you see a Black Flag waving on the Flagpole, what moves? Does the flag move? Does the wind move? Does the revolutionary movement move? What is your original nature-before May ?68, before the Spanish Revolution, before the Paris Commune?

Somehow this doesn’t seem quite right. And in fact, it’s unnecessary. From the beginning, Zen was more anarchic than anarchism. We can take it on its own terms. Just so you don’t think I’m making it all up, I’ll cite some of the greatest and most highly-respected (and respectfully ridiculed) figures in the history of Zen, including Hui-Neng (638-713), the Sixth Patriarch, Lin-Chi (d. 867), the founder of the Rinzai school, Mumon (1183-1260), the Rinzai master who assembled one of the most famous collections of koans, Dogen (1200-1253), the founder of Soto, the second major school, and Hakuin (1685-1768), the great Zen master, poet and artist who revitalized Zen practice.

I. Smashing States of Consciousness

This is what all the great teachers show: Zen is the practice of anarchy (an-archy) in the strictest and most super-orthodox sense. It rejects all ‘archys’ or principles-supposedly transcendent sources of truth and reality, which are really no more than fixed ideas, mental habits and prejudices that help create the illusion of dominating reality. These ‘principles’ are not mere innocuous ideas. They are Imperialistic Principalities that intrude their sovereign power into our very minds and spirits. As anti-statist as we may try to be, our efforts will come to little if our state of mind is a mind of state. Zen helps us dispose of the clutter of authoritarian ideological garbage that automatically collects in our normal, well-adjusted mind, so that we become free to experience and appreciate the world, nature, and the ‘Ten Thousand Things,’ the myriad beings around us, rather than just using them as fuel for our ill-fated egoistic cravings.”

(via Precious Metal. Also: Zen Anarchy-pt 2 “Killing The Buddha: Zen’s Assault on Authority”, Pt 3 “The Koan: Entering The Jetstream”)

So it was with great excitement that I read the recent translation of Jodorowsky’s spiritual autobiography, entitled-hold onto your hats-The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Like his films, it is a puzzling, wonderous, grotesque, and sometimes tedious book, but it does confirm the sense I get from his films that he is not fucking around with the mysteries. In the Sixties and Seventies, Jodorowsky was a serious practitioner of Zen, studying and meditating with a Japanese priest in Mexico City named Ejo Takata. Their koan combat is the most steady thread of this book, a male-buddy-cognitive conversation that forms a counterpoint with the other figures in the book, all of whom are women who offer Jodo various modes of initiation-artistic, sexual, magical, energetic. These women include the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who sounds as wacky brilliant as Dali, and a goat-killing silicone-implanted Mexican actress known as La Tigress.

The strongest aspect of the book are the tales themselves. Jodo is a great story-teller, and the details he provides about his fascinating life-a Chilean expat in Mexico, a renegade theatre director turned filmmaker, a celebrity in Mexico City’s hothouse creative environment-make me pray that someone chooses to translate his autobiography La Danza de la Realidad as well. His stories are rounded out with remarkable and sometimes hilariously bizarre details about random encounters with street urchins and strange synchronicities involving firing squads and singing vulvas. Late in the book, he visits a brujo, and the setting tells you all you need to know: ‘A black dog gnawed the remains of an iguana and a pig was snuggling its belly comfortably into a freshly dug hollow in a humid patch of ground.’

Full Story: Techgnosis

An excellent interview with Rick Strassman in which he talks about his new book, and reflects on his DMT research and experiences with Zen Buddhism with more hindsight than he did in his book DMT: the Spirit Molecule:

It’s a multi-authored book, non-fiction. It’s pretty much the brain-child of the second author, whose name is Slavic Wojtowicz, who is an oncology researcher for a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, and who also happens to be a big science fiction buff and illustrator. He read my book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and felt that there was a lot of overlap between the material we presented there and the kinds of things that people read and write about in science fiction. He felt it would be a fun and helpful thing to educate people in the science-fiction community about some of these overlaps and areas of similar interests.

He asked me if I’d like to collaborate with him, and I agreed. I asked another colleague of mine, Louis Eduardo Luna, who is a South American anthropologist who divides his time between Brazil and Helsinki and has been working with Ayahuasca for a few decades now. He has probably got one of the more balanced and sophisticated overviews of how to look at and apply the states and plant wisdom information that is associated with Ayahuasca. And so Louis Eduardo agreed to collaborate, and then Louis had a friend in Budapest Hungary named Ede Frecska, who is a Hungarian psychiatrist and has written a lot on new science views on shamanism – having to do with quantum mechanics and non-local theories of information transfer and storage – and so Louis Eduardo asked Ede if he’d like to collaborate. So that’s how the four of us came together to collaborate on writing the book.

Full Story: Reality Sandwich

See also: DMT and Extraterrestrial Communication at Brainsturbator.

And, of course, come to Esozone to hear Dennis McKenna talk about the role of entheogens in society, and Brainsturbator’s Thirtyseven talk about the end of reality.

“On his way across the wastes of Mongolia in 1921, Polish writer and refugee Ferdinand Ossendowski witnessed some strange behaviour on the part of his Mongol guides. Stopping their camels in the middle of nowhere, they began to pray in great earnestness while a strange hush fell over the animals and everything around. The Mongols later explained that this ritual happened whenever ‘the King of the World in his subterranean palace prays and searches out the destiny of all people on Earth.’

From assorted lamas, Ossendowski learned that this King of the World was ruler of a mysterious, but supposedly very real, kingdom, ‘Agharti.’ In Agharti, he was told, ‘the learned Panditas [masters of Buddhist arts and sciences] write on tablets of stone all the science of our planet and of the other worlds.’ Whoever gained access to the underground realm would have access to incredible knowledge – and power. Ossendowski was not exactly a casual listener. As noted in a previous article [The 'Bloody' Baron von Ungern-Sternberg: Madman or Mystic?, New Dawn No. 108 (May-June 2008)], during 1921 he would become a key adviser to ‘Mad Baron’ Roman von Ungern-Sternberg who established a short-lived regime in the Outer Mongolian capital of Urga. A self-proclaimed warrior Buddhist who dreamed of leading a holy war in Asia, the Baron allegedly tried to contact the ‘King of the World’ in hopes of furthering his scheme.

Ossendowski’s credibility later was assailed by the likes of Swedish explorer Sven Hedin. Among other things, Hedin accused the Pole of plagiarising the story of Agarthi from an earlier work by French esotericist Joseph Alexandre St.-Yves d’Alveydre. To one extent or another, that probably was true, but Hedin, a veteran seeker after lost cities, did not dismiss the possibility of a hidden Kingdom; indeed, he likely harboured the aim of finding it himself. In any event, Ossendowski did not invent the story of a fabulous land secreted somewhere in – or under - the vastness of Central Asia, be it called Agharti, Agarttha, Shangri-la, or, most commonly, Shambhala. Some believed it to be a physical, subterranean realm inhabited by an ancient, advanced race, while to others it was a spiritual dimension accessible only to the enlightened.”

(via New Dawn Magazine)

The gas mask Buddha previously seen here is a sculpture by Samuel Stimpert

(via Ectoplasmosis)

“My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is true and what is false, what is history, and what is myth.”
- Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, 1921

“In Mongolia, there was a legend of the warrior prince, Beltis-Van. Noted for his ferocity and cruelty, he spilled ‘floods of human blood before he found his death in the mountains of Uliasutay.’ His slayers interred the corpses of the Prince and his followers deep in earth, covered the graves with heavy stones, and added ‘incantations and exorcism lest their spirits again break out, carrying death and destruction.’ These measures, it was prophesied, would bind the terrible spirits until human blood once more fell upon the site.

In early 1921, so the story goes, ‘Russians came and committed murders nearby the dreadful tombs, staining them with blood.’ To some, this explained what followed. At almost the same instant, a new warlord appeared on the scene, and for the next six months he spread death and terror across the steppes and mountains of Mongolia and even into adjoining regions of Siberia. Among the Mongols he became known as the Tsagan Burkhan, the incarnate ‘God of War.’ Later, the Dalai Lama XIII proclaimed him a manifestation of the ‘wrathful deity’ Mahakala, defender of the Buddhist faith. Historically, the same individual is best known as the ‘Mad Baron’ or the ‘Bloody Baron.’ His detractors are not shy about calling him a murderous bandit or an outright psychopath.

The man in question is the Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg. His exploits can be only briefly sketched here. In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Baron Ungern found himself in eastern Siberia where he aligned himself with the anti-Bolshevik ‘White’ movement. However, his extreme monarchist sentiments and independent ways made him a loose cannon in that camp.”

(via New Dawn Magazine)

“Dr. Reginald ‘Reggie’ Ray brings us four decades of study and intensive meditation practice within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as well as a special gift for applying it to the unique problems, inspirations, and spiritual imperatives of modern people. He currently resides in Crestone, Colorado, where he is President and Spiritual Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation, founded with his wife Lee who is Vice-President, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to the practice, study and preservation of the teachings of Ch?gyam Trungpa Rinpoche and the practice lineage he embodied.”

“A senior teacher in the lineage of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Reggie talks Dharma, controversy and guides the audience through a weird form of meditation.”

(via Elephant Journal)

(Related: “I Am So Over This Buddhism Shit” by Brad Warner via Suicide Girls)

The first ten minutes of this talk is a meditation. While listening to it I found myself thinking, “Hurry up and get to the talk already”. Then Thich Nhat Hanh began to talk about how few of us are living and being in the present moment, and that almost everyone is in a hurry…

“World renown Vietnamese-born Buddhist teacher, scholar, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh talks with Vishakha N. Desai, President of The Asia Society, about his controversial, and distinguished life as a Buddhist and a voice for peace from the days of the Vietnam War, to the ongoing conflicts of the 21st century.”

(via FORA TV)

“The patient sat with his eyes closed, submerged in the rhythm of his own breathing, and after a while noticed that he was thinking about his troubled relationship with his father. “I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.” The therapist nodded. “Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.” “That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.”

This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century BC Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the attention of talk therapists of all stripes, including academic researchers, Freudian analysts in private practice and skeptics who see all the hallmarks of another fad.

For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process – and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”

(via The International Herald Tribune)

(Related: “Sit down, shut up, breathe:Can meditation make you a calmer, more compassionate person?” via The SF Gate)

“In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay called ‘Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,’ in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists. To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are ‘hard-wired’ to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems. You put a magnetic helmet around their heads and they will begin to think they are having a spiritual epiphany. If they suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, they will show signs of hyperreligiosity, an overexcitement of the brain tissue that leads sufferers to believe they are conversing with God.

Wolfe understood the central assertion contained in this kind of thinking: Everything is material and ‘the soul is dead.’ He anticipated the way the genetic and neuroscience revolutions would affect public debate. They would kick off another fundamental argument over whether God exists.”

(via The New York Times. h/t: Neuroanthropology )

Julian Walker is doing an interesting series on his blog called Simply Put which is based on his “21st Century Spirituality model”:

“My 21st Century Spirituality model is an attempt to offer a contemporary alternative to old world religious metaphysics and new age magical thinking. As such the model asserts three key principles:

* critical thinking (and cognitive/intellectual self-development)

* inquiry-based (as opposed to faith-based) practice

* shadow-work (depth-oriented psychological honesty).

Simply Put is a distilled statement of critical thinking based truths that have inquiry-based practice application in conjunction with shadow-work. The first three installments will be a re-run from earlier this year and thereafter I plan to add more installments to this series. This time around I will add an extended commentary in the comments section below and video blogs offering elaboration and meditation instruction – this is just the beginning.”

(Simply Put #1. First Commentary on Simply Put. Simply Put #1: Meditation Video)

(Julian Walker’s Blog)

Behind the powerful din created by the popular and celebrity-embraced “Save Tibet,” campaign is the fact that the CIA is behind the Tibet independence movement.

According to many reports, the Dalai Lama himself may be a long-time CIA asset. See The Role of the CIA behind the Dalai Lama’s holy cloak and The Tibet Card.

In addition to being geostrategically situated, Tibet is also rich with oil and gas, and minerals — and this is just part of the larger superpower warfare between the US and China. See Tibet, the "great game", and the CIA.

The legions of pro-Tibet activists also seem largely unaware of the historical fact that the “holy land of compassion” has been a CIA pawn since the end of World War II. The infamous Tolstoi Mission sent CIA operatives into Tibet, with plans to establish it as a US military base, from which the US could control the entire Asian region. This activity flourished under the US-supported, opium-banked Nationalist Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-Shek.

When the Communists rose to power, the CIA trained Tibetans in guerrilla tactics to use against the regime in Peking, and thousands of Tibetans lost their lives in these battles. Who benefited? Who really gave the orders then — and who is driving the agenda now?

There is little doubt that Anglo-American interests continue to use Tibet, exploit the image of Tibet as a holy place under siege, and bamboozle naïve (and well-heeled) outside activists with slick marketing, in order to undermine Beijing.

Denunciations of Beijing’s brutal crackdowns do not take into account the covert operations and outside infiltrations that triggered the crackdowns in the first place.

Read the whole article via Online Journal

“This is a transcript of a small discussion with botanist-poet Dale Pendell, a long-time practitioner of Zen Buddhism and the occult, a student of the legendary intellectual Norman O. Brown, and-as they say-a graduate of Dr. Hofmann. It took place at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland, on 23rd March 2008 (read my review). A small group of people who’d just attended Dale’s talk on Zen and psychedelics gathered round a table in the busy foyer, and Dale created a focused bubble of attentiveness with his measured, colourful discourse.

[Question about who taught DP about the occult in Los Angeles.]

Dale Pendell: His name’s not really important. He kind of hid his traces, because he insisted on being without credentials. Anytime I would look for credentials, like, ‘Where did you get your Zen training, Carl?’ ‘Why do you ask? Is that gonna make you believe something I say?’ So he would never tell me. But he had a personal teacher. What he taught was the importance of a personal teacher. His personal teacher was a woman named Mary. And that’s as far back as I know the transmission. But I get a sense of high knowledge being passed on that way: through personal relationships, with some occult structure overt.

I don’t know, he was able to walk in and out of Zen temples like he belonged there. He was an artist, and sat with Suzuki, Roshi in San Francisco, and they palled around like old friends. When Trungpa came to town, they palled around like old friends-he was his driver for a while. Every place he went, he liberated people; he gave people permission. He constantly violated expected behaviour, and laughed a lot. I still consider him my true teacher. I would like to be able to give people permission the way he did.

So, I can’t speak for any occult tradition. I just know there are transmissions of higher knowledge.”

(via Dreamflesh)

Ask most decently informed Westerners the following questions: What country has for most of the past two plus decades been racked with ethnic and religious violence supported enthusiastically by fanatical clerics, has a constitution that states the duty of the state is to foster a religion, been manipulated by a large regional power, and was the true incubator for horrifyingly calculated suicide bombers? It’s a solid bet that the typical response would be a country in the Middle East or at least one with a Muslim majority (one shutters when contemplating how many responders would answer ‘Palestine’); however the correct answer is the South Asian country Sri Lanka, the combatants ethnic Tamil separatists against a majority Sinhalese government, and the fanatical clerics in this case, Buddhist monks.

If the reality of war-crazed Buddhist monks shatters the conceptions of good hearted liberals, the largely overlooked Sri Lankan conflict features many other of the worst hallmarks of modern warfare including the use of morally destroyed child soldiers, a terrorized urban population, death squads, and a large internal refugee crisis. Like most of Africa’s post-colonial civil wars, the civil war in Sri Lanka takes place within an ecologically brilliant ecosystem and an otherwise beautiful cultural environment.

Full Story: Counter Currents.

See also: Buddhism in Burma.

By Ted Rall.

Kerry Howley on Hit and Run:

Ian Buruma has a Sunday L.A. Times piece boldly asserting that while religious devotion can sometimes provoke violence, it can also “be a force for good.” Exhibit A is the Burmese monk protest. I’m not going to quibble with the sentiment, but using Burmese monks as proof of religion’s awesome power to do good is really, really weird.

The State Peace and Development Council derives its legitimacy from public support for Buddhism, and in recent years has leaned even more heavily on approving pronouncements from prominent religious officials. Theravada Buddhism is the establishment religion under a repressive military regime. No actual Burma scholars dispute this, as far as I know. Anyone with doubts should check out the military’s propaganda paper, which is a dual attempt to showcase the devotion of military officials and advocate peaceful, Buddhist complacency on the part of the Burmese. It adopts the tone of an authoritarian yoga instructor for a reason.

The monks, known as the sangha, regularly accept extravagant and highly publicized gifts from well placed military officials; this is a desperately poor country filled with gilded gold pagodas. The rebuilding of Buddhist shrines can be a public project, with villagers force to participate. Monks have in the past refused to perform ceremonies for NLD members. It’s difficult to define complicity when everyone may be acting out of fear, but you can’t call a religion that confers legitimacy on a bunch of thugs (and advocates passivism in response) entirely helpful.
Yes, the Burmese monks have a history of peaceful protest, as in 1990 and 1962. But you wouldn’t want to define the monks by these protests any more than you would a pope by his opposition to communism. It’s rather more complicated than that.

I support the Burmese people’s struggle against the military junta. Let us just hope they are able to replace their government with something other than a theocracy.

More on Buddhism and tyranny:

Zen at War.

Friendly Feudalism.

In the Shadow of the Dalai Lama.

Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth.

His Material Highness.

Zen at War review.

Shadow of the Dalai Lama (full text).

Over the last 25 years thousands of people worldwide have been initiated into the highest levels of Buddhism by the 14th Dalai Lama. Fundamental to this initiation is a holy text (tantra), namely the Kalachakra-Tantra, part of which is the Shambhala Myth.

Kalachakra is Sanskrit and means ‘wheel of time’. In recent times the Kalachakra-Tantra has been increasingly critically scrutinised. In our western debate-oriented society it stands to reason that the Dalai Lama himself answers some of these critical questions in order to ensure that any misinterpretations are corrected.

Full Story: In the Shadow of the Dalai Lama.

A Thai Buddhist monk cut off his penis with a machete because he had an erection during meditation and declined to have it reattached, saying he had renounced all earthly cares, a doctor and a newspaper said on Wednesday.

The 35-year-old monk, whose name was withheld for privacy reasons, allowed medical staff at Maharaj hospital, 780 km (480 miles) south of Bangkok to dress his wound, but refused reattachment, hospital chief Prawing Euanontouch said.

Full Story: Yahoo! News (thanks, Trevor).