streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 2:42 am on September 14, 2025 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 429 ), Hardie Karges ( 240 ), language ( 145 ), meditation ( 190 ), Pali ( 20 ), samatha, Sanskrit ( 22 ), Vipassana ( 14 )   

  Buddhist Meditation and Mediation…of Extremes 

  

  Concentrate on heartbeat, concentrate on breath. Both will grow slower, and life will grow longer. And I don’t know why, but that seems to be true, attention to details such as heartbeat and breath mean that those details will likely become more precise, and with less gasping and grasping. I know, because I count. And if the counting is intended to be intentional, but not transactional, then this is merely one of the side effects, I guess. Meditation does not need a reason to occur, but the benefits can be multiple.

  The purpose of meditation is usually something no more—and no less—than calming, traditionally known as samatha or shamatha in Pali or Sanskrit, while the more modern vipassana aims for insight. In practical terms this might be a more thing-focused meditation on something very specific, such as breath, or a more field-focused acceptance of everything within the field of perception, with a view to the ties that bind them. Language is neither necessary nor intrinsic to either and can simply be a recognition that now I am breathing or now I am aware of sound.

  Counting breaths is a little bit of a trick with no official status in any meditation ‘system’ that I know of—but it works. And I confess that I had difficulty accomplishing or enjoying meditation, until I adopted that little crutch as a useful tool and metaphor for physical existence. For, isn’t life in a physical body on a physical planet little more than counting the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years until that chapter comes to its last verse and some other narrative take over? It sometimes seems that way. Such is the Middle Path…

   

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  hardie karges 3:57 am on December 17, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: duality ( 5 ), Hardie Karges ( 240 ), homo sapiens ( 7 ), language ( 145 ), logic ( 14 ), meditation ( 190 ), monkey mind ( 4 ), patanjali, samadhi ( 13 ), samatha, silence ( 13 ), spirituality ( 27 ), yoga ( 6 )   

  Buddhism: Silence is Better than Language…  

  

  You can say ‘namaste’ all day and prove little. You can say nothing and prove much. Or you can sit in samadhi all day and prove everything, ‘samadhi’ being that meditative state of total absorption, in which the threads of language are locked out at the gates without credentials for entry. Because language is that element of mental activity tainted with the brush of corruption, duality at its most obvious, subjects verbing adjectivized objects so adverbially that prepositions threaten to revolt and assume post-positions, conjunctions just looking for somewhere to put an ‘and,’ ‘but’ only ‘if’ conditions can be avoided, so tenses only indicative, nothing subjunctive allowed. 

  All of which is to say that there’s more to life than language, OR logic, and often it’s even positively negative, if you care to find some meditative transcendence for even a moment in this increasingly noisy world or ours, crowded and clusterf*cked almost beyond recognition of the sublime Nature that it once was, notwithstanding the sporadic violence inherent to that same Nature.  

  Language is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allowed homo sapiens to subdue, or outdo, all its competitors in the competition for the low-hanging fruit of life, those skills allowing multiple individuals to act as one for the purpose of being ‘firstest with the mostest,’ skills indispensable for survival when life is on the line and food is not yet on the table. This can be proven conclusively with the timelines of our competitors’ mutual demise in the face of sapiens’ overwhelming superiority. 

  On a more practical day-to-day basis, it’s simply an easy recipe for mindfulness, antidote for the common complaint of ‘monkey mind,’ during which our minds are so possessed of internal chatter that it’s virtually impossible to think properly, much less achieve some level of ‘calm abiding,’ i.e. samatha. So, ironically, the very thing that is our military strength is our existential downfall—unless we can control it. This is the unique sapiens challenge to zoological superiority and key to the future ascendance of our species—or not. Thus, Buddhist practice is more than an individual accomplishment; it’s truly intrinsic to our survival. 
   
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  hardie karges 2:53 am on August 6, 2023 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: anapanasati ( 8 ), Buddhism ( 429 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 160 ), dharma ( 35 ), Hardie Karges ( 240 ), language ( 145 ), mantra, meditation ( 190 ), mindfulness ( 34 ), New Age ( 8 ), samatha, Theravada ( 51 ), Tibetan ( 3 ), Transcendental Meditation ( 4 ), Vipassana ( 14 ), yoga ( 6 )   

  Space is the Place–to Meditate…  

  

  You don’t have to go anywhere to meditate, except inside. Much is made in the modern New Age movements of all the different kinds of meditation, which, according to the books and blogs can easily number into the dozens, if not hundreds. But most of those sources aren’t really Buddhist, not in any strict sense. Still, a quick survey reveals a plethora: mindfulness, spiritual, focused, movement, mantra, transcendental (TM), progressive, loving-kindness, visualization, guided, mantra, present moment, Vipassana, chakra, yoga, and ‘candle-gazing.’ That’s a lot of bliss, and we’re only getting started. 

  And that’s the problem, of course, that meditation is often marketed as some kind of bliss machine, when nothing could really be further from the truth. With the possible exception of Vipassana, i.e. ‘insight,’ none of the above could really even be considered Buddhist, which seems to originate with ‘anapanasati,’ awareness of breath, before subdividing into ‘samatha,’ calm abiding, and the aforementioned Vipassana, which puts the goal first and foremost, the insight that one expects to get from the practice.  

  Now, I’m not sure where ‘guided meditation’ originated, but that is unheard of in strict Theravada Buddhism, where silence reigns supreme and strict stillness is the foundation for that. Now, I suspect that guided meditation is chiefly a modern Western-promoted permutation, for Westerners who just can’t stand silence, but will happily sit for a story, but I could be wrong, since Tibetan meditation seems very eclectic and certainly could incorporate some spoken word(s).  

  But for me meditation is silent, emptiness incarnate, and guided meditation is a hybrid form which incorporates a ‘dharma talk’ into the practice itself, certainly not a bad thing, BUT: silence is still golden, at least in my book. If you have a problem with silence, then you should really work on that if you really want to delve deep into Buddhism. Because, as I said in the opening statement, “you don’t have to go anywhere to meditate, except inside.” And that’s the trick, to go inside yourself, where thought becomes anti-thought and talk becomes anti-talk. Thus, everything is shown to be the opposite of what it seems, and that is not a bad thing. “Meditate for at least twenty minutes a day, unless you don’t have time, and then meditate for an hour.” That says it all. 

   
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  hardie karges 11:08 am on September 27, 2020 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Alan Watts ( 5 ), anapanasati ( 8 ), Bhavana, Chan ( 4 ), dhyana ( 5 ), jhana, meditation ( 190 ), samadhi ( 13 ), samatha, Vipassana ( 14 ), Zen ( 31 )   

  Meditation and Mediation, Buddhism on the Half-Shell… 

  

  The best meditation requires no app. Only silence can solve the problems caused by language. Not that I don’t find ‘guided meditations’ interesting, I just don’t think that they are the best form of meditation.

  Not that there need be many forms of meditation in the first place, but that comes with the turf, the modern commercial turf, that just one more thing under the tree will get us through the next year with flying colors, the colors of Christmas and New Year in joy and celebration of what I am not sure, but it seems that abundance is the common theme, my cup running over and all that jazz, eternal life and all that rap.

  But is the ‘special insight’ of ‘vipassana’ really some sort of qualitative improvement over the ‘awareness of breathing’ in anapanasati? Is there really any difference between the ‘calm abiding’ of ‘samatha’ and the ‘concentration’ of ‘samadhi’?

  Self-described experts go on and on about the ‘four different kinds’ of meditation like bloggers slicing and dicing adverbs and artichokes for the special garnish to Sunday brunch, to be ladled over with the special sauce of ‘mindfulness.’

  Then there is the ‘mental development’ of bhavana holding lengthy sessions, while the ‘trance-like states’ of ‘dhyana’ and ‘jhana’ morph into entire schools of Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen, so that entire cultures can be exported overseas a millennium later, and Alan Watts can make a living without ever having to plant rice, much less harvest it.

  So I suppose that there is a difference between a ‘one-focus’ meditation and a ‘field-focus’ meditation, but I’m really not sure, if the underlying concentration is upon the breath, or if you’ve got a really quiet place, then worth noticing the heartbeat, which our ears normally block out as background noise.

  But there seems to be a more significant distinction between meditation ‘upon’ something and meditation for meditation’s own sake. And this is where guided meditation comes in, because it is certainly a meditation upon something, if it is meditation at all.

  And I’m not sure who started this, because I have practiced the art in formal and semi-formal settings in three SE Asian countries, all of the Theravada school of Buddhism, and I can assure you that there was no bloke holding forth at the time. But I do see this online with monks of the Tibetan school, and saw it myself with a Western ex-monk of the same school in Nepal. So which is better, guided or silent?

  That I can’t say, but when I discussed all this with research neurologists interested in measuring the effects of meditation on the brain, all they wanted to know was, “Were you able to stop the internal dialogue?” To which I giddily responded something like, “Yes.” To which they responded with a dubious, “Do you understand this concept?” “Of course. That’s all I remember of Don Juan’s ‘Tales of Yaqui Power.”

  Guided meditation won’t do that, so you still need silent meditation IMHO. But to be a good Buddhist, more important than the sutras, the precepts, and all the meditations are the simple acts of kindness and compassion, ‘metta karuna’…

  hardie karges and David Cole are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    David Cole 4:46 pm on September 27, 2020 Permalink | Reply

    Sādhu… Thanks!

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      hardie karges 5:14 pm on September 27, 2020 Permalink | Reply

      Welcome!