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(RNS) Lama Surya Das, the “Buddha from Brooklyn,” is one of the 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.
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 threeyear 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. “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: “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.
“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.”
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.
We need to erode the Grand Canyon-like gulf we see today between self and
other, 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.”
You may have already noticed that Surya Das speaks in long, often hilarious
sentences, filled with puns and jokes. This rhetorical style is of a piece with his
conceptual point — that awakening isn’t some calm, blissed-out state but is being
at home with every state of mind, including the rapid-fire speech of a born-andbred New Yorker.
For example, here’s how he summarizes the key teaching of the book, complete
with 13 adjectives, 10 nouns and 11 verbs: “Can I say that this book presents,
elucidates, rationalizes and instructs, in the extraordinary American-Buddhism’s
fresh and newly minted, jargon-free, straight talkin’, practical and flexible,
adaptable, personal and integratable, nonsectarian organic ways for a whole new
way of meditating, with tips and pointers to find your own way and authentic
practice style, thus avoiding many, if not most, of the obstacles and hindrances,
doubts and distractions practitioners so often face and stumble upon?”
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 – https://lamasuryadivorce.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/how-tomeditate-tips-from-lama-surya-das-the-buddha-from-brooklyn/