How To Meditate: Tips From Lama
Surya Das, The 'Buddha From Brooklyn'
06/07/2015
Jay Michaelson HUFF
POST
(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 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. “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.”
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. 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-and-bred 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?”