Course Overview

Meditation and Beyond Course Overview

This is a secular course:

Although many of the meditations and discussions originate from Buddhism, Hinduism, and others - this course presents these outside of any religious or metaphysical context. Western Buddhism is really already secular but I want to be sure to be 100% secular with no metaphysical beliefs at all. I will attribute the concepts to where they come from because I think honesty requires giving credit where credit is due.

There are now many example of this information being taught in a secular way - Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, corporate and military programs, etc.

So, I will avoid any metaphysical beliefs, or any belief for that matter. There should be nothing here that should conflict with your faith (or non-faith). Everything here should be possible to be directly experienced by you or have scientific evidence to back it up.

As an example, consider a popular meditation (actually a contemplation) called metta meditation (or loving kindness) where one directs well wishes to other people. If I say that those well wishes affect those other people directly (as TM does) that is a belief and I should be called on it. If I say that it makes your own mind more loving toward others that is something that you can experience yourself, so it is valid to say.

Get what you want out of it:

If you just want stress reduction you can take it at that level. If you want to condition your mind to be more calm, less reactive, less likely to pick up stress in the first place, i.e. ‘happier’, one can go further in the meditations and philosophy. If one wants to experience Awakening (aka Enlightenment, Liberation, etc.) one can go deep into the meditation, philosophy, and meditation retreats.

Beginners mind:

It is best to have what Zen calls the “beginners mind”. To quote Shunryu Suzuki - "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."

One finds that there are many levels of knowing - understanding the words, understanding the concept at a cognitive level, experiencing it, then even deeper understanding with deeper experiences. I have often thought I understood something pretty well only to discover later through deeper experiences that I had previously had a very superficial understanding. Even then one needs to be open to even deeper understanding. One never knows how deep the understanding can go.

When one starts they quickly encounter apparent paradoxes. A paradox means that we do yet not understand the deeper picture. Think of 2 twigs sticking up from the water in a lake. When we pull on one the other moves with no apparent connection! When we lower the lake we see that both twigs are attached to the same tree. If paradoxes bug you (as they really did me) rest in ‘not knowing’ until your deeper understanding and experiences resolve the paradox.

Expectations:

One of the apparent paradoxes (and there are many) is having goals, desires, and expectations. One needs to have a goal to do something but if that goal or expectation is held too tightly it will be very detrimental to your practice here. We will see that one can spend a lot of effort in the practice if one wishes but doing so in an ‘effortlessness’ way is also key. I think what helped me greatly early on was my skeptical but open attitude. I really did not believe in much of this (particularly in Awakening) but I was willing to try it and see what happens. I have seen the same people year after year, in retreat after retreat, that just tried too hard to reach Awakening, making it that much harder.

The resolution to this paradox is very important. It is to do the effort with an intention, but being open and equanimus with whatever results occur. It is like a lab experiment - one starts with an intention to prove something, but an experiment can return different results than expected. Sometimes those unexpected results lead to great discoveries.