Monkey See, Monkey Do

samadhi cushions, the non-profit who made the very cushions i meditate upon, has a hip new ad posted on youtube. who knew a meditation store could be so… up to date?

and they have another short video just about the store.

today in the nytimes business section:

TOO ANIMATED? Edwin Catmull, who runs Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios, just got back from his first meditation retreat, at the Shambhala Mountain Center in northern Colorado.

“I almost flunked meditation,” he said. “When things are intense and there’s a lot at stake, I have no trouble focusing. But when they’re not intense, my brain starts popping off in all sorts of places.”

Mr. Catmull is often painted as the left-brain businessman and technologist who runs Pixar’s nuts and bolts — and who helped develop RenderMan, the software behind Pixar’s animation, which has been commercially available for 20 years.

nice to see business leaders approaching meditation these days. but oh how often i hear the sentiment that one “almost flunked” meditation.

really it’s a training, like going to the gym. you can’t fail at going to the gym, it’s just great that you get there! nonetheless, we think we’re not “doing it right” unless we’re able to keep our focus in meditation. in my experience, you can train yourself to hold a laser like focus but that’s not necessary to get the benefit — which is seeing how your mind works from the inside out. all you need is to keep at it. especially when your mind is all over the place, when else would be a better time to learn how that monkey mind works?

Smokey the Bear Sutra
by Gary Snyder

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite Void gave a Discourse to all the assembled elements and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings, the flying beings, and the sitting beings — even grasses, to the number of thirteen billions, each one born from a seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

“In some future time, there will be a continent called America. It will have great centers of power called such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur, Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon. The human race in that era will get into troubles all over its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”

“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth. My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger: and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”

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for awhile i led a small meditation group in a room that had a fairly noisy clock. for the most part i ignored the ticking of the clock. but i heard once that repetitive sounds can be insightful, so a few times i paid really close attention to both the sound and how my mind reacted to it.

the clock was fairly regular, but there was often a slight variation in the sound and timing of the second hand ticking.

from that i suspected that my mind was always slightly anticipating the sound, often comparing the anticipation with the experience, and then from that noting if things were expected or unexpected. if it did something different, that might be noteworthy enough to draw my attention.

that amazed me.

because it meant to make comparisons and determine “unexpectedness” my mind was constantly predicting and estimating what kind of experience i was about to have. then my mind compared its prediction to actual experience. all below my usual awareness.

my theory seems to have played out in more detail and rigor. last month some researchers at caltech and mit posited the we use a ‘forward model’ when planning motion. this allows, for example, baseball batters to swing at a ball that is too fast to perceive real time.

from my meditation experience, i suspect this kind of internal modeling is happening often and not just in planning motion. it might be that we’re interpolating most things, and then relating more to the mental model than to direct perception. but maybe i’m going too far with my idle conjecture? what do you think?

david brooks at the new york times posted an op-ed column recently titled the neural buddhists and it made the rounds quickly in my buddhist circles.

i have a few random thoughts about it, but generally i’m unsure about the characterization of contemplative buddhism as merely psychological and completely logical as it comes to american shores. there is something about it, in my experience, that is about seeing the limitations of logic to model our world and gaining flexibility or rather awareness of that tendency to reduce and then dismiss large parts of our experience. nonetheless, i have some thoughts below the break.

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in my recent reading about prison contemplative programs and the movie The Dhamma Brothers, i came across this video introduction to the Prison Dharma Network interviewing its founder Fleet Maull. Prison Dharma Network coordinates interfaith prison programs but focuses on supporting meditation.

dig it…

just saw this trailer for another documentary about meditation programs in prison, but this one occurring in the bible belt. The film is titled The Dhamma Brothers:

four more clips from the film are on the film’s web site.

i’m so grateful to the TED lectures, posted for free on the web. but this lecture by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor is something you just must see. it’s 18 minutes long. and describes her own experience of having a stroke, and what she learned from that experience about compassion and perspective.

TED has a category of talks that relate to mind, if you have an appetite for more.

this photo was taken by the jovial monk paden from gampo abbey. you’ll find the pictures i took on flickr, starting with an incredible sunrise and including a picture i took of paden cleaning his oryoki set after lunch.