Medley

Mindfulness meditation produces personal experiences that are not readily interpretable by scientists who want to study its psychiatric benefits in the brain. At a conference near Boston April 5, 2014, Brown University researchers will describe how they've been able to integrate mindfulness experience with hard neuroscience data to advance more rigorous study.

Lao Babauta – USA

A simplicity manifesto in the Age of Distraction: Part seven

Let go of the need to stay updated

Many of us are slaves to the news, to the need to keep updated with what’s happening in the world, in our business niche, with our friends.

Joshua M. Greene – USA

In the aftermath of John Lennon’s murder, there was only one place George Harrison could go for shelter.

George Harrison

Recently, a student in my university course on mysticism waited until everyone had left the room before coming up to my desk. “Professor Greene,” she said, “you know that point in class about how levels of meditation can be compared to different levels of love? I wanted you to know that really touched me. I’d never thought about meditation as a way to deepen love for another human being. So—thanks.” This from a twenty-three-year old who rarely said anything in class, all the action going on below the surface. She tossed her backpack over her shoulder and sauntered out. It was the kind of payoff for a teacher that makes up for months of academic trivia.

Some 30 minutes of meditation daily may improve symptoms of anxiety and depression, a new Johns Hopkins analysis of previously published research suggests.

“A lot of people use meditation, but it’s not a practice considered part of mainstream medical therapy for anything,” says Madhav Goyal, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and leader of a study published online Jan. 6 in JAMA Internal Medicine. “But in our study, meditation appeared to provide as much relief from some anxiety and depression symptoms as what other studies have found from antidepressants.” These patients did not typically have full-blown anxiety or depression.

Leo Babauta – USA

A simplicity manifesto in the Age of Distraction: Part six

You Don’t Need To Respond

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

Lao Tzu

We have developed a fairly urgent need to respond to many things: emails, Tweets & other social network status updates, instant messages, phone calls, text messages, blog posts, blog comments, forum-posts, and more. This need to respond gives us anxiety until we’ve responded, but unfortunately, there is a never-ending stream of things that require your response.

Jan Jelle Keppler – Belgium

[This talk was given during 15th Annual International Theosophy Conference held in August 2013 in New York. The theme title of the conference was “How to Awaken Compassion? - H. P. Blavatsky and the Eternal Secret Doctrine”]

Introduction

During my studies at the Faculty for Comparative study of Religions in Antwerp, Belgium, lectures were given by Mrs. Drs. Martine Strubbe on the subject of Buddhism. For the exam at the end of the academic year 2009-2010, she requested her students to prepare a paper in the form of a treatise about a Buddhist scholar.

The scholar I chose, Tsong Kha-pa, lived in Tibet from 1357 until 1419. According to many writers he is considered to be the main reformer of Tibetan Buddhism. He is also seen as the actual founder of the order of the New Kadampa also called the Gelugpa’s or the Yellow Cap monks. Both the Tibetan Head of State in exile, the Dalai Lama as well as the spiritual leader, the Panchen Lama, belong to this order.

Joshua M. Greene – USA

“The people of India have a tremendous spiritual strength, which I

don’t think is found elsewhere. The spirit of the people, the beauty, the

goodness—that’s what I’ve been trying to learn about.”

-- George Harrison, 1966

In 1969, devotees from the London Radha Krishna temple invited me to take part in an album of mantras and prayers that George Harrison was producing at Apple Studios. Meeting him for the first time, I was struck by his humility, by his understated humor, and by his excitement over the music we had gathered to make. Recording these ancient songs was his way of letting people know “there’s more to life than boogying,” as he put it. At that time, the Beatles were dissolving but George’s solo career was growing thanks in large measure to his daily meditations and yoga practice. For the next thirty-two years, until his death from cancer at age fifty-eight, George would continue to produce recordings of Nada Brahma, God in sacred sound.