This article was edited on June 22, 2015. “But authentic meditative practices can enhance and even unleash the creativity and imagination.” -Religion News Service “The anti-intellectual meditators, thought-swatters, and imagination-suppressors have long ruled meditation-oriented circles in the West,” he said. Lama Surya (or a guest host if Lama is unavailable) will lead us in meditation and prayers and offer a short teaching. He is an authorized lama and lineage holder in the Nyingmapa School of Tibetan Buddhism, and a personal disciple of the leading grand lamas of that tradition. That is part of the ancient Tibetan tradition known as Lojong, which often features elaborate visualizations. Lama Surya Das has spent over forty years studying Zen, Vipassana, yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with the great masters of Asia, including the Dalai Lama’s own teachers. He proposes what he calls “co-meditation”-not trying to find a quiet “moment of Zen” apart from the messy, noisy world of work, family, and children but inviting all of the noise into meditation. The goal, he said, is “to genuinely learn how to gain direct access to Oneness, wholeness, completeness, integration with all the parts of themselves and life.” In his new book, Make Me One with Everything (the answer to a Buddhist joke: “What did the Zen monk say to the hot dog vendor?”), Surya Das argues for a return to the original purpose of Buddhist meditation: not relaxation, but liberation. “Some teachers actually encourage people to try to stop thinking, when in fact meditative awareness means being mindful of thoughts and feelings, not simply trying to reduce, alter, or white them out and achieve some kind of oblivion.” “‘Quiet your mind’ or ‘calm and clear your mind’ are instructions I hear way too much,” he said. Because of the way meditation is taught, many people think they can’t do it, he said. Surya Das is not entirely happy about that. Each year, 1 million Americans take up the practice for the first time. In secular forms, it’s widespread in health care, education, the corporate world, even the military. Now meditation-especially mindfulness, which trains the mind to observe nonjudgmentally and attentively-has gone mainstream. But Surya Das shifted gears in the early 1970s to Tibetan Buddhism, subsequently completing two three-year silent meditation retreats and becoming one of the first Westerners to be authorized as a Tibetan lama. Read our latest issue or browse back issues.īorn Jeffrey Miller, he was given the name “Surya Das” by the Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba more than 40 years ago.
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