Virtual Reality Meditation

This story, by Dan Ackerman, appears in the spring 2017 edition of CNET Magazine

The first thing I see is sunlight glistening off the gently rolling waves in the distance, while I stand on a small foliage-decked island so green it almost glows. Later, I'm standing on the balcony of the kind of aggressively minimalist luxury apartment only seen in movies and television shows. I can imagine a soft breeze flowing through these expansive spaces, but it's only that: imagination.

In fact, I'm standing in my own living room and in a virtual reality creation, one especially designed to complement the practice of meditation, or at least one very specific version of it.

The program I'm using is called Guided Meditation VR, and I'm experiencing it through an HTC Vive virtual reality headset connected to powerful desktop computer. Besides choosing from about a dozen different locales to meditate in, I can listen to a wide variety of audio programs, called guided meditations, that run from 2 to 10 minutes and cover topics from breathing to compassion. (The app is $15 on the Steam platform for Vive, and a limited version is available for free for the phone-based Gear VR headset.)

Meditation in virtual locations isn't the most traditional way to approach the practice, but it may entice sceptics who aren't keen to sit in their living rooms with their eyes shut. "VR adds a really powerful, emotional ability to be in another place and to actually feel that emotional weight of another place," says Josh Farkas, CEO of Cubicle Ninjas, Guided Meditation's developer. "You can meditate anywhere, but at the end of the day, the ability to actually go to a virtual world and take a breather lowers the barrier to entry, and I hope gets people more excited."

You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral

At our weekly sangha meetings and meditation members often bring along readings to share. This one is by Aaron Freeman and came via Dr Kate Granger's blog on 'Why you'd want a physicist at your funeral'. Although not directly Buddhist, it reiterates the interconnectedness of everything and the impermanence inherent in the very structure of the Universe.



"You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell them that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly."

Check out "Pr. Brian Cox - A Night with the Stars" for an explanation of the science.

Western Science and Tibetan Buddhism

From the New York Times.......................

Quantum theory tells us that the world is a product of an infinite number of random events. Buddhism teaches us that nothing happens without a cause, trapping the universe in an unending karmic cycle.

Reconciling the two might seem as challenging as trying to explain the Higgs boson to a kindergarten class. But if someone has to do it, it might as well be the team of scholars, translators and six Tibetan monks clad in maroon robes who can be spied wandering among the magnolias at Emory University here.

They were joined this week by the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, who decided seven years ago that it was time to merge the hard science of the laboratory with the soft science of the meditative mind.

The leaders at Emory, who already had created formal relationships with Tibetan students there, agreed, and a unique partnership was formed.

For the monks, some of the challenges have been mundane, like learning to like pizza and trying to understand Lord Dooley, the university’s skeleton mascot.

For the team of professors involved in the project, the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, there are the larger issues, like how to develop methods to quantify the power of meditation in a way the scientific world might actually accept.

But for the Dalai Lama, an energetic 78-year-old who rises at 3:30 every morning for four hours of meditation, his pet project is kind of a no-brainer.

Buddhist teaching offers education about the mind, he said in an interview after lunch Thursday at the home of James W. Wagner, the university president.

“It is quite rich material about what I call the inner world,” he said. “Modern science is very highly developed in matters concerning the material world. These two things separately are not complete. Together, the external and the internal worlds are complete.”

The first batch of six monks, who arrived on campus on 2010, have gone back to India, where much of the Tibetan exile community lives, and started teaching. Dozens of monks and nuns have taken lectures from Emory professors who traveled to Dharamsala, India, to instruct them, and 15 English-Tibetan science textbooks have been developed for monastic students.

The university pays about $700,000 a year for the program, which includes tuition for the monks, who then go back and teach science in the monasteries.

It has not been a smooth road. It took until last year for Buddhist leaders to accept science education as a mandatory part of monastic education. It was the first major change in 600 years.

But as anyone who has tried to carry out an idea from the boss knows, the real work is in the details.

Many of the toughest battles have come down to seemingly simple but vexing issues of lexicon. How does one create new words for concepts like photosynthesis and clones, which have no equivalent in the Tibetan language or culture? How does one begin to name thousands of molecules and chemical compounds? And what of words like process, which have several levels of meaning for Tibetans?

So far, 2,500 new scientific terms have been added to the Tibetan language.

“Much of our work is to make new phrases novel enough so students won’t take them with literal meaning,” said Tsondue Samphel, who leads the team of translators.

Still, some concepts are quite easy to translate.

“We understand impermanence of things as simply existing through our traditions,” said Jampa Khechok, 34, one of the new monks on campus. “We are now challenged to understand the nature of impermanence through the study of how fast particles decay.”

Learning has gone both ways. Professors here find themselves contemplating the science of the heart and mind in new ways. A student presenting a report on the cardiovascular system described the physiological reaction his own cardiovascular system might have if he were told the Tibetan people were free.

Debate is a constant, said Alexander Escobar of Emory, who has gone to India to teach biology. Monks have wanted to know, for example, how he could be so sure that seawater once covered the Himalayas. (The answer? Fossils.)

Western scholars have had to look at their work with a new lens, too, contemplating matters like the nature and origins of consciousness.

One result has been the development of something called cognitively based compassion training, a secular mediation program proven to improve empathy.

The partnership has had other, more practical applications.

Linda Hutton, a social worker, has a longstanding clinical practice treating sexually abused children and families in Greenville, S.C. She drove to Atlanta this week to attend a private luncheon with the Dalai Lama, who was making his sixth visit to Emory.

She teaches her young victims and their families to practice mindfulness and how to use meditation and breathing to cope with trauma.

“I draw from a lot of medical research,” she said, “but what I have found here transcends that.”

Dr Who Reincarnates as Peter Capaldi

So Matt Smith is to regenerate as Peter Capaldi playing the role of Dr Who.

Or....................

Is the Doctor Reincarnating with the persona of Peter Capaldi?

And now this article from the Buddhist Channel............

Can Buddhists Be Time Travellers?

As we shall see, the Buddhist answer to this interesting question is complex and nuanced… When it comes to travel, we tend to think of it physically. However, it is possible to travel mentally as well. We only need to recall the most vivid memory to know what this means. 

Isle of Wight from Space

Further to the previous story, this one's got nothing to do with Buddhism but is about the island!

This amazing photo of the Isle of Wight was taken by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield from the International Space Station. (We're at the second small bay round from the Neddles at the Western tip of the island).

Note - Pr. Brian Cox - A Night with the Stars

The full length version of Pr. Brian Cox's brilliant program "A Night with the Stars", where he manages to explain virtually every significant theory in the field of physics in the space of one hour has been reinstated and can be seen HERE on our video page.

Creator Deity vs. Discoverer Dude

I've just come across this fascinating piece, by David Barash, posted in the Chronicle of Higher Education....................

"Early in my teaching career—sometime in the mid Paleozoic—I employed short essay exams in my undergraduate animal behavior class at the University of Washington. (Now that the enrollment has metastasized from 24 to 300, I’ve regretfully turned to computer-graded multiple choice questions.) One of those now-extinct short essays asked students to explain, briefly, Darwin’s primary scientific contribution. I still remember one student’s answer: “He invented evolution.”

Sorry, no cigar … and no credit. (The correct answer, btw, isn’t even that Darwin discovered evolution or that he presented abundant evidence in its favor; rather, he came up with the most plausible explanation for the mechanism whereby evolution proceeds: namely, natural selection. Others, such as Robert Chambers and Darwin’s own grandfather, had preceded him in describing some sort of historical, evolutionary connection among organisms.) In any event, I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between inventing/creating something on the one hand and discovering/revealing it on the other, regardless of mechanism employed.

One of my current writing projects is a book about the parallels between biology and Buddhism, and in meditating on this, I came up with what strikes me as an interesting distinction, one that to my knowledge hasn’t been previously identified, to whit: Whereas the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) claim that their god literally created the world and along with it, the natural laws that govern its functioning, Buddhism promotes a very different perspective, namely that the Buddha—emphatically not a god, by his own insistence—didn’t create the Dharma (the way the world wags); rather, he discovered it. Thus, for Buddhists, reality  exists prior to any supernatural event; for the Big Three, it exists only because of it.

To me, at least, this distinction seems important … although I’m not at all sure where, precisely, it leads. Thus, unlike the Abrahamic triad, Buddhism encourages participants to explore for themselves, explicitly enjoining devotees to reject any teachings that seem incongruent with their own experience of reality. I’d think that there can, and should, be a world of difference between believing in a Creator God versus a Discoverer Dude when it comes to interacting with the known world, although the Bridgewater Treatises, for example, in the early 19^th century, were inspired by fervent Christian-based desire to admire and worship God by laying out in detail an enhanced appreciation of his creation. Even if the world and every critter within it is thought to have been made by a Creator, the nature of his/hers/its supposed creation is still available to be explored by the rest of us (thereby contributing to yet greater admiration of the presumed Creator Creature). But a problem nonetheless remains, since the rules of that creation are necessarily assumed to be inviolate and perfect, which generates a problem when we consider, for example, the blind spot in the vertebrate retina, the lousy design of the human lower back, or the downright ludicrous structure of the urinary/reproductive system … especially in men.

Interestingly, a source of tension between science and religious belief seems to have been even more important in Islam than in Christianity. Thus, roughly a thousand years ago, the Sufi philosopher al-Ghazzali—whose writing was, and still is, highly influential in the Muslim world—argued strenuously against anything even approximating a “law of nature,” since this would by definition restrict the freedom of an all-powerful deity. Al-Ghazzali famously wrote, for example, that when a piece of paper (or maybe it was a ball of cotton, I can’t remember) was heated sufficiently, it changed color and gave off heat, flame and smoke not because it was burning according to its nature, but because it pleased Allah for this kind of transformation to take place and at this particular time. Had Allah been of a different mind at such a moment, the paper would have turned green, remained unaffected, or transmuted into a pot of tea, an ice cube or a giant ox …  whatever Allah willed, independent of any laws of nature or rules of science. Rules, schmules! Laws, schmaws!

For al-Ghazzali, and generations of Islamic thinkers following him, it was simply unacceptable for any “laws of nature” to exist, insofar as they would limit God’s options. To a degree, this parallels the traditional Catholic Christian view of the Pelagian heresy, which had claimed that people could secure for themselves a place in heaven by virtue of their good deeds; the problem with this (from the Pope’s perspective) was that it suggested we could twist God’s arm and achieve our own ends in response to our personal desires, whereas in truth, such “decisions” must be up to God alone.

By contrast, it seems to me that Buddhism promotes a worldview in which the Dharma simply exists: including gravity, strong and weak forces, photons and electrons and yes, Higgs Bosons—assuming they are real—along with the second law of thermodynamics and the phenomenon of natural selection and, of course, the laws of karma, such that our job is to reveal and understand them, without worrying that—like Galileo or Darwin—we might run afoul of prior assertions of “God’s will as revealed in his perfect and immutable creation.” And this, in turn, ought to lend itself to a more liberated, exploratory, and productive approach to understanding all that is, imperfect and unplanned as it may be.

Sounds reasonable to me, except for one problem: Why, then, has Western science—associated at least in part and in recent centuries with Judeo-Christian religious traditions—been so much more productive than has “Buddhist science”?"