09-08-2016, 10:59 AM
This guy is a high-level newscaster, although I had never heard of him. He had a panic attack on air and started looking around for ways to deal with it. Simultaneously, he was put on a spirituality beat by Peter Jennings, his boss. Good stuff about meeting Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, and a good look at the TV news business. Finding Chopra and Tolle hokey, he gets a book on Buddhism from his wife and starts meditating, and meets some famous Buddhist writers (all of whom are Jewish: Mark Epstein, Joseph Goldstein, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Sharon Salzburg). Oddly he never mentions classic works on Buddhism like those by Suzuki or Alan Watts. There is a good section about going on a meditation retreat and on the whole it was quite enjoyable. The title comes from him looking for a way to explain why he meditates to people who find it foolish, so he says it makes him 10% happier. I also liked the fact that he is a skeptic but is willing to change his mind about people and things. And at the end he talks to researchers and bring in some scientific data too.
On a personal note, pretty much my only meditation experience was that day at the monastery (Is that the right word?) with DM before his wedding, where I learned that I am not flexible enough for Zazen and that it seemed impossible. But I've been seeing more and more research on the benefits of it, so I kept thinking I should start, but most instructions say to sit for 15 minutes a day, which seemed way too hard. This guy actually gave me a hand there - he said start with five minutes, and increase or not as you feel like it. That sounded doable, so I've been doing it for a few weeks now. I went up to 8 minutes since it takes a couple of minutes to get settled. And I'm still not enlightened. But from the first day I did notice that if I started drawing right afterward, my hand was really steady, and it felt easier to just let the line go where it wanted and not worry about it. To me that's enough benefit for now. And I feel a bit silly to write about it.
If you want to learn about Buddhism, don't read this; he doesn't really say much, I think because he mainly wrote this to get people to meditate. It made me realize that I don't know that much either beyond the short version of the story of the Buddha; Joseph Campbell (in the Masks of God) focuses on that and the Buddha realms of Mahayana Buddhism and their imagery. So I picked up Alan Watts' Way of Zen at the library since it has both a short history of Buddhism and a chapter on Taoism as well. And I used to love to listen to him on the radio.
On a personal note, pretty much my only meditation experience was that day at the monastery (Is that the right word?) with DM before his wedding, where I learned that I am not flexible enough for Zazen and that it seemed impossible. But I've been seeing more and more research on the benefits of it, so I kept thinking I should start, but most instructions say to sit for 15 minutes a day, which seemed way too hard. This guy actually gave me a hand there - he said start with five minutes, and increase or not as you feel like it. That sounded doable, so I've been doing it for a few weeks now. I went up to 8 minutes since it takes a couple of minutes to get settled. And I'm still not enlightened. But from the first day I did notice that if I started drawing right afterward, my hand was really steady, and it felt easier to just let the line go where it wanted and not worry about it. To me that's enough benefit for now. And I feel a bit silly to write about it.
If you want to learn about Buddhism, don't read this; he doesn't really say much, I think because he mainly wrote this to get people to meditate. It made me realize that I don't know that much either beyond the short version of the story of the Buddha; Joseph Campbell (in the Masks of God) focuses on that and the Buddha realms of Mahayana Buddhism and their imagery. So I picked up Alan Watts' Way of Zen at the library since it has both a short history of Buddhism and a chapter on Taoism as well. And I used to love to listen to him on the radio.
the hands that guide me are invisible
