In the first week of December last year the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies held a five-day residential course on Buddhist Psychology. The intention of the course was to introduce students to the classical models of mind and mental processing contained in the primary texts of the Pali Canon and other Buddhist texts, and then to review this material from the contemporary perspectives of modern psychology. The program was co-sponsored by the Cambridge Institute of Meditation and … [Read more...]
The Experience of Feeling (Insight into the Aggregates)
We study and practice with the Buddha’s teaching on the five aggregates in order to take part in the liberating journey towards realizing that body, feeling, perception, intention and consciousness are impermanent, suffering and not self. I have found that the key to this breakthrough liberation has been in observing and discovering for myself how the second aggregate, vedanā or feeling, operates. In the Buddha’s teaching on dependent origination, vedanā marks what some people call the … [Read more...]
Interconnected…Or Not?
When I look up the word “connected” in my dictionary, I find synonyms such as “bound,” “fastened,” and “attached.” Last I heard, these were not considered a good thing in Buddhism. So why do we hear so much about “interconnectedness” these days? Was the Buddha really teaching us that “all things are interconnected?” The explanation usually given is that this is what is meant by dependent origination. But is it? As sometimes happens, I think in using this term we are seizing upon a notion from … [Read more...]
Food for Awakening: The Role of Appropriate Action
The Myth of Bare Attention The Buddha never used the word for “bare attention” in his meditation instructions. That’s because he realized that attention never occurs in a bare, pure or unconditioned form. It’s always colored by views and perceptions—the labels you tend to give to events—and by intentions: your choice of what to attend to and your purpose in being attentive. If you don’t understand the conditioned nature of even simple acts of attention, you might assume that a moment of … [Read more...]
Mind Changing Brain Changing Mind: The Dharma and Neuroscience
The knowledge of neuroscience has doubled in the last twenty years. It will probably double again in the next twenty years. I think that neuropsychology is, broadly, about where biology was a hundred years after the invention of the microscope: around 1725. In contrast, Buddhism is a twenty-five-hundred-year-old tradition. You don't need an EEG or MRI to sit and observe your own mind, to open your heart and practice with sincerity. I don't think of neuropsychology as a replacement for … [Read more...]
The Sixth Sense
We are used to thinking of ourselves as autonomous agents experiencing an objective world that is out there, separate from us in here. This is as natural to us as breathing. Unfortunately such a view of the self inevitably brings with it a great deal of suffering. The Buddha has shown us how to overcome this suffering by teaching us how to see our experience of self more clearly. Following his guidelines, we can learn to see how we construct a sense of self from the raw material of experience. … [Read more...]
Back to the Source
John Peacock has been an academic and meditation teacher for 25 years, including monastic training in both the Tibetan and Theravadin traditions. He currently teaches Buddhist studies and Indian religions at the University of Bristol and leads meditation retreats both in the United States and Britain. How did you first enter the stream of the Dharma? I became interested in Eastern religions and philosophy at about the age of eleven and started reading around Indian thought, … [Read more...]
The Not-Self Strategy
This is a revised version of a talk given during the course on Background to Breath Meditation taught by the author at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in February, 1993. Books on Buddhism often state that one of the Buddha’s most basic tenets is that there is no soul or self. Of course, different books qualify this tenet in different ways. Some say that, no, there is no self, but yes there is the moral principle of karma operating beyond death; others say, no, there is no separate … [Read more...]
Dependent Origination
This article has been excerpted from a program offered by Christina at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies on October 18,1998. Please note that this represents only a small portion of the material offered in the full program. In the Buddha's teachings, the second noble truth is not a theory about what happens to somebody else, but is a process which is going on over and over again in our own lives—through all our days, and countless times every single day. This process in Pali is called … [Read more...]
Awareness of Thinking: Recollective Awareness Practice
Jason Siff, a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka in the late 1980's, has been teaching meditation in the United States since 1990. He is the founding teacher of the Skillful Meditation Project in Los Angeles. He will teach Awareness of Thinking at BCBS August 13-17. Insight Journal: We heard something about your upcoming book, Thoughts are Not the Enemy, about a year ago. Are you getting any interesting reactions to the ideas in the book? Jason Siff: The book will be released in October, though I … [Read more...]