SBN interviewed David Edwards, the co-editor of the UK-based media watch site Media Lens and author of several books. David discussed his critique of corporate media bias and how political activists can make a real difference by focusing on being, not just on doing; on learning to truly live and feel, rather than solely on external change.
Commenting on the English novelist Phillip Pullman’s interview with the New Scientist journal, Ramsey Margolis urges us to to develop a creative, imaginative approach to the dharma so that we can respond to the issues we’re facing today as living beings on this planet: climate emergency, social inequality and exclusion, species extinction (including our own), and much more.
There is now a secular meditation group in Hamilton, New Zealand. The group will be meeting in-person every Monday night at 6:15 pm at the local library.
Despite its increasing popularity, there is much we do not know about how people practice meditation, including the optimal amount or ‘dose’ associated with particular outcomes. Consider joining a study to help researchers learn more about the impact of meditation.
Bernat Font provides a summary and review of Evan Thompson’s recent book, ‘Why I am not a Buddhist’. While criticizing key concepts in ‘Buddhist modernism’, Thompson asserts that, at its best, Buddhism can challenge our excessive confidence that science explains what the world really is like while offering a radical critique to our narcissistic concern with the self.
We have to choose between the freedom that is the condition of an open, awakened mind or to defend any kind of orthodoxy, traditional or not. If we choose the former, we need a wisdom that is capable of capturing every moment of wonder and in the next instant letting it go without any sense of regret or bewilderment.
To integrate contemplative practice into life requires more than becoming proficient in techniques of meditation. It entails the cultivation and refinement of a sensibility about the totality of your existence—from intimate moments of personal anguish to the endless suffering of the world.
Our challenge is to remain lucid, aware, and present. This is Gotama’s injunction and one of his main teachings. To understand this reality means, in traditional Buddhist terms, to understand the middle way, emptiness and not-self. It means entering the stream of the river of life to go against the current.
Touching the Earth groups aspire to treat participants as equals, where no one is paid to lead or facilitate, and each participant takes responsibility for cultivating their own path and for supporting others in cultivating theirs. The basic format involves meditation, journaling one’s meditation experience, and then exploring the meditation in triads.
Meditative practice enables us to develop a more present, lucid and conscious connection with what surrounds us, in the precise moment and place where we find ourselves. Meditative practice does not take us beyond that present moment in its totality. If anything, it leads us deeper, to union with it.
