It’s attractive, pocket-sized, deliberately written to be read in one sitting, he says. By now most people know something about meditation, however distorted their understanding might be.īut Iyer’s book fills an important niche. You’d think one more such book wouldn’t be necessary. Pico Iyer’s beautiful little book The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, an extended TED talk about the value of silence, appears within this rich swirl of Buddhist teachings and traditions.
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An Amazon search for Buddhism turns up 34,575 books for sale at the moment, plus mala beads, wall calendars, bells, amulets, and Buddhist baby clothes. In the last decade, more and more Buddhist texts have been translated and made available in general, the publication of books on meditation and Buddhist practice has skyrocketed. But it was at least ten years before the cultural mainstream began to notice what meditation is and does - and then I felt I could come out of the closet, so to speak. Hooked on that clarity, and wanting more, I started meditating every day.
Nothing mystical-schmystical.Īfter that weekend, I noticed that the world seemed subtly brighter, as if someone had stripped off the hazy film in that Claritin commercial. He calls his approach “The Science of Enlightenment”: a very specific way of becoming more aware of our senses, of learning to stay with what’s actually here. Meaning that the method is applicable to any religious practice.
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You can run any software on it you wish,” he said.
I would never have stayed with the practice if he hadn’t approached it as he did: “Meditation is the hardware. Sitting on a cushion in silence for minutes - or hours, it seemed like - felt too silly for words. Back in 1987, at my first weekend retreat with him, we participants got the giggles. Shinzen’s intent has always been to teach meditation techniques and general philosophy minus cultural trappings. Shinzen, who continues to work with students worldwide, speaks fluent Japanese and was the translator for Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, the Rinzai Zen teacher who founded dozens of Zen Centers in this country, most notably the one at Mount Baldy in Southern California. My first teacher, Shinzen Young, was one of the early guard of Western vipassana meditation teachers in the 1970s (among them Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield), many of whom were trained in Asia and Japan.
Suzuki, the Thai Buddhist monk Buddhadasa, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. However, before the Maharishi, the way to religious enlightenment had been paved by such Christian spiritual leaders as Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating, both heavily influenced by Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D. In America back then what did most of us know of Eastern religions, other than the white-bearded, giggling Indian Maharishi Yogi, guru to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, who claimed he could teach people to levitate? TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO when I began to practice Buddhist meditation, I didn’t tell anyone for fear of seeming weird, or - worse for a university professor - stupid.
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