This Guardian article of August 6th highlights questions around the new fashion of “Mindfulness”. One question it tries to answer is if there is nothing new about meditation, why has it suddenly gone mainstream? (SN)
Most of what is wrong in the modern world can be cured by not thinking too much. From psoriasis to depression to giving yourself a ”competitive advantage” in the workplace, the answer touted everywhere right now is mindfulness. Just let go for few minutes a day, breathe, observe your thoughts as ripples across a pond, feel every sensation around you. Stop your mind whirring and, lo, miraculously, everything will improve “at a cellular level”.
Sorry, it’s not working for me because I cannot rid myself of the thought: “Why this, why now?” There is nothing wrong with trying to relax: the problem lies in the “trying”. And there is nothing new about meditation, so why has it suddenly gone mainstream?
What was once the province of people who had backpacked across India has been gentrified and repackaged as a great cure-all, legitimated by doctors and scientists. Now everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Lena Dunham and William Hague is giving it a go.
The City is awash with bankers trying to quiet their minds. Schoolchildren are given mindfulness training to help them with their anxieties. Yoga was once a bit countercultural, too, and now it vies with Zumba, rumba and Pilates classes.
We know the west takes hold of eastern mysticism, ignores its history and faith and turns it into a secular and accessible pastime. For mindfulness is Buddhism without the awkward Buddhist bits. A complex philosophy is rendered as self-help. What does freedom from attachment and desire mean in this self-centred world? What is radical acceptance? Why practise non-judgment? Those who have practised meditation all their lives may not say it’s to get a promotion or be less stressed. There is a whole history of thought here.
But no, once Arianna Huffington is on the case, you know there is money to be made in commodifying blankness. Indeed, the whole of Silicon Valley has hugged mindfulness close, as have the US marines, who use it as part of “mind fitness” to help soldiers relax and learn “emotional intelligence”.
Thus, in the finance sector, companies where bankers are super-stressed – unlike poor people – arrange for their staff to have 10-minute daily meditations. It’s all scienced-up with names such as Mind Lab to shake off the hippyish/religious/psychic-adventurer connotations. Keep fit for the brain.
It’s even in art galleries. I wandered around Marina Abramović’s 512 hours waiting for enlightenment. (At the Serpentine Gallety). Or something. She is using many of the techniques of mindfulness, from counting grains of rice to staring at walls to get us to slow down. I like her work because she is a powerful presence, but when she took my hand and guided me to sit down, as ever, I wondered why I must do as I was told and why everyone else was so passive. But they were clearly having spiritual experiences. Or were asleep. This exercise in mindfulness then, was guided by ego – which is fitting, as the art world is the most ego-ridden, sensationalist and utterly mindless spectacle of all.
Much of the cult of mindfulness is a reaction to technology. It speaks the language of detox, of decluttering. There is too much information. We need to clear our minds. Be and not do. The new ascetic is someone who goes for a walk without their phone or takes a week off Twitter to cleanse themselves. This version of meditation requires no more than the faith that we can all be self-improving part-time gurus. It requires no commitment to a community, and it’s cheap.
The corporate world sees that it can make its workers more self-reliant, balanced and focused. What could be better? Take your medicine, because the mindfulness movement is symptomatic of what late capitalism requires of us. A contemplative space opens up where religion used to be. We learn techniques to make us more efficient. This neutered, apolitical approach is to help us personally – it has nothing to say on the structural difficulties that we live with. It lets go of the idea that we can change the world; it merely helps us function better in it.
Living in the moment, non-judgmentally, being more self-aware, it’s all good. But, actually, more and more people are switching themselves off. They cannot even watch the news because they feel so powerless to do anything about it.
The mindfulness coalition of life coaches, business people and healers cannot – and does not –promise peace, but why are we to think less when we need to think more?
Something here is, well, mindless. Maybe a mantra is all you need and maybe we should all devote more time to changing our minds. But for the time being I am just letting that thought drift right through me.
Suzanne Moore
This is really a stupid article. Mindfulness is, amongst other things, giving the mind a rest. Then when you use it again, it works better.
I’m inclined to agree, Alok. Also, anything that begins to introduce people to mastering their minds can’t be altogether a bad thing. Forget ‘religion’, let the individual get his/her act together – first things first!
This quote, at the end of the article, speaks volumes:
“Why are we to think less when we need to think more?”
I reckon (notice, I didn’t say ‘think’!) that the writer has little grasp of just how destructive compulsive (ie emotionally-driven) thinking is. She probably thinks she IS ‘the thinker’ – you know, totally identified and all that…Silly little robotic journalist! (Nice to have another one to feel superior to though, of course).
In comparison to last centuries, last decades, last weeks and days, world is becoming more and more just.
Quite often, people who think they are better than the world are always in contempt.
One thing which I feel continuously in the West is that age of Indian gurus has breathed its last. Western people have become self-reliant, collective awakening is taking place.
Those who are bit emotional and mental type add some Buddhism in their life, elites and educated ones go to yoga and fitness or walking or bicycling in the nature.
As a human being I feel happy to see the new West emerging…Though I feel in my heart of the heart there was a scope of brand OSHO as one-stop shop for best of the best.
I wonder (since quite a while), Satyadeva, where you take your arrogance from. Today, in judging Suzanne Moore’s article and following Alok in your special and ever-repetitive contemptuous approach.
What I DO hope that in your everyday life and work, other people are not exposed or even dependent on you and your applying your kind of mind as a bureaucracy agent.
Otherwise you both, that’s what I feel, didn´t really read the article of Suzanne Moore, eg this:
“The corporate world sees that it can make its workers more self-reliant, balanced and focused. What could be better? Take your medicine, because the mindfulness movement is symptomatic of what late capitalism requires of us. A contemplative space opens up where religion used to be. We learn techniques to make us more efficient. This neutered, apolitical approach is to help us personally – it has nothing to say on the structural difficulties that we live with. It lets go of the idea that we can change the world; it merely helps us function better in it.”
In these lines, for example, I see much of what is happening on a broad scale here, mirrored.
That ‘Meditation goes Mainstream’, I wouldn’t say in response to the SN titled thread, but maybe the content of Suzanne´s article gives a few hints why that is the case and how that is covered by ‘wellness’ products and with what consequences.
Madhu
Madhu, I know very well what point Ms Moore was trying to make and I say it’s irrelevant for the simple reason (as I wrote before) that anything that’s helping large numbers of people to begin to ‘go inside’, to sense and truly feel what’s going on in their inner space and thereby to let go of stress, tension, self-negating patterns etc. has to be a good thing.
It’s a pointless ‘red herring’ to drag in ideas, concepts and theories about ‘what’s wrong with the world’ and make out that because ‘Mindfulness’ seems relatively ‘simple’ stuff (although apparently highly effective for many) that sceptics might regard as the realm of mere ‘beginners’, it is somehow ‘suspect’, merely ‘supporting a corrupt system’ etc. etc.
If we’re going to take that attitude then we might as well deny the value of anything directly or indirectly therapeutic that helps us let go of symptoms and perhaps even sources of unhappiness.
As I said, first things first: let’s clear our individual space before imagining we’re fit to pronounce on how the world ‘should’ be. Have you done that yet? Perhaps not, judging by your posts at SN. (And, I’d bet a pound to a penny that neither has Ms Moore).
Until you (and she) have, then I wouldn’t necessarily trust any of your (or her) pronouncements on the ‘outer’ as they’re likely to be driven by or at best ‘coloured’ by emotionally-drenched, purely person-al considerations.
And by the way, I must inform you that you appear to confuse ironic humour with arrogance. And that’s not the first time this has been said to you here, is it?
“Has to be a good thing” is a deleted semantic imperative of inclusive idiomatic supposition.
Says who?…In what circumstances?…For what strategy?…And what result?
I had a manual for jobseekers given me a few years back produced for the DSS by a US motivational company. By day two it was obvious that some of the return to workers in the meeting room who had “mum” tatooed on their knuckles found the manual’s exhortation to “look in the mirror and love and approve of oneself every day” such an ideal response to getting that ASDA shelf-stacking job that barely 4 of us remained to the end of the hilarious week.
The company producing this shite was ‘done ‘ for $400 million of tax evasion in the US and when I asked about it ( I do my research, as always ) I was reassured that the UK one was separate and uninvolved…except that a year later the Director here in the Uk was done for exactly the same usury fraud.
The fraud is not the issue really though, it’s the mentality of the Kapo in the Gulag thats endemic, whether it’s the bottom or top of the ladder.
So much waste of authentic human vitality for virtual systems of gobshite.
Martyn, you write:
” “Has to be a good thing” is a deleted semantic imperative of inclusive idiomatic supposition.
Says who?…In what circumstances?…For what strategy?…And what result?”
As Alok John, Karima and I have already said or implied, your (and Madhu’s and Ms Moore’s) approach unnecessarily complicates the issue. Yes, we all know the shortcomings of this world, we’ve almost certainly all suffered at its hands, but just because something has been taken up and recommended by large and small corporations and health authorities etc. doesn’t automatically mean something ‘sinister’ is going on.
Besides such laughably absurd stuff as you cited in your DSS course, some or perhaps many of these outfits might well also provide head and neck massages and/or exercise facilities during work time. Are such initiatives also to be condemned as watered-down ‘New Age’ bullshine or worse, virtually ‘tightening the noose’ around their employees’ necks?
We might see through and detest many or all aspects of ‘globalisation’ and so on, but why be wilfully blind to any positives advocated by the so-easy-to-blame-for everything ‘baddies’ (who can also most conveniently be surrogate ‘bad parents’ or other authority figures ripe for our projections)?
The other day, for instance, I saw a tv programme that included various people’s experiences of practising mindfulness, all of them positive, with one young man (in his 20′s) totally grateful, ascribing his recovery from schizophrenic symptoms to using the techniques he’d learned. Is anyone going to tell me that was a waste of his time, that he’d been somehow ‘duped’ by the ‘agents of this oppressive society’, the National Health Service?
Such are the shortcomings of fixed, almost ideological standpoints, which can make it hard, or even impossible, to see the good when we’re emotionally fixated on looking for the bad.
SD,
The virtual ideology is already incipient. Moreover, it is pernicious.
Osho’s joy and therefore mine by my own equation is my reference point, which gives me a very tangible reference for how to be.
This does its thing when called upon. Those who are touched by this in even my most recent so-called employed work reverberate with similar liberation and joy…
We are not here to be defined by the logistics of those who would limit that or who toy with it without regard. This is completion and of course takes every form into its service. It is not servile and refutes imposition of anything less than itself.
The difference is between social workers witb the adaptational lingo for obeisance or a world of collaborative indulgence. Decided by each person’s own integrity and risk and lust.
Why “so-called employed”, Martyn? Either you were employed or not, surely?!
No one ‘forces’ you, a grown man, or any other adult to be or do anything, you’re totally free to opt out of whatever you wish (and take any consequences). Why complain then? Because ‘the world’ isn’t good enough for you? What a great potential excuse for ‘failure’ or ‘inadequacy’, or whatever…Perhaps it’s ‘not good enough’ for anyone, and never has been. Plus ca change…
I still don’t see what’s intrinsically ‘wrong’ about many people being introduced to methods whereby they can effectively begin to help themselves cope better with their lives – in AND out of the workplace, by the way.
Who would be in favour of abolishing health services, public and private, or any therapeutic enterprises, educational initiatives or any other means whereby human suffering is alleviated? Only a complete, ideologically-driven fool.
You seem to be ignorant of usury. Ask my fellow-teachers who welcomed my presence, ask my fellow-students.You are an internecine fighter, SD, who is here for your pleasure. I write for mine.
If your interpretations of my prose and experience serve your purposes then so be your fancy. They do not replace it. Remember, this is reporting, neither actual nor replete. And as with all semantics can be inverted by a flick of contrastive assertion or derogation
I don’t know about exploitation? Many poor people in the world have little or no choice as to how they earn, or rather ‘scrape’ a living. I somehow doubt that’s true in your case though, Martyn.
You have a choice: if you don’t like the situation, you can leave it. End of! Unless you enjoy indulging yourself by playing the victim…
That’s how the world is, it doesn’t always meet our expectations, does it? Far from it in fact, as we all know too well!
Although let’s face it, no matter what rather obscure terms you like to use, you (and I and pretty well all of us in the West) are not exactly in a state of economic deprivation, are you (we)?
I haven’t used a condemnation of self-regard. Perhaps if you viewed the documentary series entitled ‘The Century of Self’ you might avoid the cul-de-sac of our usual degenerative, disassembling exchanges.
As in too much of your writing here, Martyn, I find it rather hard to ascertain exactly what you mean by the first sentence, above.
SD, in answer to your last Q below…
Then if it’s tricky to understand the Latinised roots of the etymology then ask for help from co-bloggers, they are an invaluable online resource. I can’t help because I’m a fastidious, surreptitious word-mangler who inveigles incoherence with elaborated purport.
PS: I’d like to know more about this choice and consequences thing you mention. Has it got anything to do with Osho and living the life you love,every day/moment? Does it help if I want what I’ve got? Will Mr. Brand put me right? Is a right mouthful similar to a neckful of mindful?
But Martyn, using obscurantist-type vocabulary is often enough a sort of linguistic smokescreen, an attempt to imply ‘profound significance’ to that which might not seem all that impressive when put in simpler terms which don’t demand a Classics or English degree to make sense of them and it.
As for not knowing the meaning of ‘take the consequences’, pull the other one, Swami. But methinks you’re addicted to presenting yourself as a ‘victim’ – and probably have been since you were rather young. Which undermines much of what you say.
“….We learn techniques to make us more efficient. This neutered, apolitical approach is to help us personally – it has nothing to say on the structural difficulties that we live with. It lets go of the idea that we can change the world; it merely helps us function better in it.”
This is all very well, but it is not so easy to change the world. The unconsciousness of people has a way of stymieing the best thought-out schemes. I seem to remember a guy called Karl Marx who had a great scheme worked out!
The Olde Boye taught that institutions are a product of people’s consciousness. To change the world you have to change consciousness first; that is all you can do. I tend to agree. These corporations that teach mindfulness with a view to increasing productivity may one day find they were playing with fire.
“These corporations that teach mindfulness with a view to increasing productivity may one day find they were playing with fire.”
Nice line, Alok.
Excellent thought.
(´◔౪◔)
Good post, Alok.
Also, one way of looking at the world is that its very purpose, from a spiritual perspective, is to fuck us up! Or at least to challenge us with difficulties, with ‘mirrors’ if you like, so that we can see where we actually are, where our meditation and awareness has brought us.
Every day out there we come across people and situations with the potential to send us right off-balance – what a great contemporaray ‘monastery’, eh?!!
Telling the bosses and the whole system to fuck off is exceedingly mindful…especially when it lasts a lifetime. Here’s a selected extract from he who loved the odd Czech beer:
Ideology is the key to the success of the modern post-totalitarian dictatorship. Today’s dictatorships are too large and complex and cannot be held together by raw force and fear. They require their subjects not merely to submit passively but to participate actively in their own subjection, and ideology is the mechanism to accomplish this.
Ideology represents the life-denying, self-perpetuating, narcissistic, repressive acts of the bureaucracy as being devoted to their opposites: “government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.
Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.
In other words, once you make the decision to participate in the ideological mask for your subservient behaviour you become a part of this glue that affixes ideology over reality and gives ideology power. It doesn’t matter that you inwardly don’t really believe the explicit message of the ideology, because the explicit message isn’t the important one, and it doesn’t matter if you believe it or not so long as you agree to continue acting as though you did.
But while ideology is central to the post-totalitarian power structure, the interests of the structure itself are paramount, and the ideology—or the interpretation of it anyway—will tend to be subordinate to it. The tighter the control that the government exercises over communication and expression, the better it will be able to enforce and manipulate the orthodox interpretation of the ideology and the more the ideology will come to float far above reality, more-or-less completely detached from it: “a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.”
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5SMwnwmdrTg/UqywyaQAbII/AAAAAAAAAwg/1nrwFxe5Z6I/s320/A+Sick+Society.jpg
Wow! Prem Martyn,
The first time that i use this word here, after reading your midnight contribution of ‘Spiritual-Transparency-International, so to say.
The question always is, what comes out of it when the diagnoses of the symptoms of a sickness are thoroughly accomplished – and if to know about it makes us shock-frozen or stuck in a way of ‘rebellion for rebellion’s sake’, hitting and damaging ourselves instead of inventing healing medicine on all levels.
It is not all of ‘yesterday’ to say “Meditation is a Medication”, not at all.
To look for support applying that Medicine though, one has to develop nowadays also a strong capacity to differentiate the false from the true; the whole technical progress, especially in terms of communication conditions, is such a challenge.
And human support we all are in need of, whether we deny it or not.
Exposed anyway to the tsunami-like amount of healing and helping offers
everywhere does not make it easy to just sit in a clear diagnosis and give yourself all the time and space you need to let your unique and special treat come up as a result from silently sitting – doing nothing and letting a remedy come up in a natural way.
It will not be the remedy of your neighbour then, and I speak from the spiritual plane, where we all are very unique exemplars of the species and yet together.
Martyn, you may also like (?) just two of the many support power editors who wrote in their ‘closets’ shadings that gave me a helping hand in the very last decades.
One is the author, ARNO GRUEN:
A Swiss psychoanalyst who got a price in dedication to the ‘Geschwister Scholl’ here who were, like many others, murdered by the Nazi regime.
He has such a lot to say about stuff you (and me too) are busy with.
The other one I just discovered is JARON LANIER:
He can be listened to on youtube and also writes in English: ´Who Owns The Future?’ Mr Lanier is a top Internet Specialist and very well deserves to be a Transparency Rebellious Spirit.
Such a lot to SIT IN.
And maybe let some more essential responding come through like these words I am able to share with you this Sunday morning.
Love,
Madhu
Thanks, Madhu, for the links. The “wow!” which you bestow upon me belongs to Havel, it is he who liked the odd Czech beer. My apologies if my quote was insufficiently obvious about the author.
The attraction of rebelliousness to its object is clearly an identity, which itself, in the hierarchy of values, stands at the top of human needs according to the Dilts and Maslow models.
Osho’s example was that identity was essentially playful and that playfulness was redemptive of attachment to identity. Hence the jokes and the joy.
Mindfulness, apparently it is happening. A full mind…why not call it mindemptiness? Anyway, we all have to start somewhere don’t we, perhaps it is the first grade in the primary school of waking up, and we, the so-called uni-multiversity students are scoffing at the ‘lower’ grade, but we all have been there.
And any meditation technique, also Osho’s, are helpful in the beginning, but in the end in my experience they become a burden, and they drop away.
,
And a PS for Martyn:
I know it was handled as a kind of slogan:
“Meditation is the ONLY medication”.
I feel it more as THE essential prerequisite – and what can come after that as a result of that is risk and challenge, same as we observe Nature when Nature copes as intelligently as possible in trial and error to conditions it is exposed to.
Human species is not the so-called ‘crown’ of all that happening but imagines to be that – quite stubborn.
So – always – there´s such a lot to learn from Nature.
If meditation can create better employees, efficient workers whose hardware does not get burn out that easily, yuppie managers of Osho Resort were the first ones who wanted to catch this trend. This is one of the reasons of transition from Osho Commune to Osho Resort.
If money is repairing the old men, why to bother about eco-friendly new Man?
During 1997 onwards when it was clear India is going to make long ticket economic reforms and is open for multi-nationals to bring the liquid cash, generate millions of jobs, BMW and Mercedes were first ones to open their production facilities in Pune district.
Other than the five star hospitality industry, our Osho people too wanted to expand and carry the business executives with deep pockets on Osho´s shoulders. They also thought such snobbish businessmen will feel hesitant to come to us if we give too much stress to the dead men, better is to make focus on his relaxation techniques, massages, beer bar, night life, clean water, mouth- watering food etc.
During this time Sodexo replaced Osho!
I was sure at that time too, the strategy will not work. People with analytical brain are not the Russian masses!
Meanwhile, in the West too, disciples of last century´s famous Indian gurus were also not showing any sign of exemplary progress. Instead of hiding their faces under the Bible, they had new titles similar like, ‘Coke, Marlboro and Meditation.’
This surely has become the trend among the 35-plus: a transition from Marlboro to Meditation!
“By doing we come to know who we are. And the more you do, the more of your inner potentialities are actualised. So do millions of things so you can see who you are. There is no other way. That’s why, groping in the dark, you will find your medium, your element. Nobody can say who you are by reading your hand or your stars. You will have to find out. And it is good. It is not something very fixed.”
Osho, ‘Cypress in the Courtyard’, Chapter 8.
http://txs.io/XLpb
One of my gurus, Swami Bharat, in his infinite wisdom once declared:
“Mind is as stupid as the people who have one.”
These western baboons reading and writing in the secular leftist press, who cannot understand the need for great teachers like Arun to hobnob with genocidists and those who exercise the time-honoured right-to-rape are bound to speak utter nonsense about “mindfulness” because their minds are full to overflowing, like a public toilet in a monastery that is full of Christian homosexuals and do not realise that it is mindlessness that is needed!
Let me remind you of the Zen story about the master who asked his disciples to find something for the leak in the roof.
The disciple who brought a bucket thought, like these logical fools like SD and Lokesh, that because it was logical that they were a light unto themselves! But the disciple who brought a sieve was declared enlightened!.
This was because the disciple with the sieve acted in the right spirit!
The spirit of mindlessness is the thing!
It is the same with genocide, wife-beating or homosexual-beating. When it is done in the right spirit that is the spirit of true meditation, it is good! The logical western mind can never understand it!
The words of Shantam and Oldman illustrate the point perfectly!
There is no thinking involved! It just flies out into cyberspace like the nocturnal emissions of a newly-crowned true yogi, a Gandhi or a Modi…
It is beyond the mind!
Swaha!
Yahoo!
Hari Om!
Great stuff, Yogi.
These depraved ex-sannyasin baboons!
First, they are hurling themselves at the feet of Russell Brand, that un-sattvic titillator of random genital organs,and now they are recommending perverted New-Age reading material for the satisfaction of their worldly desires!
Instead of meditating and committing themselves to the true spiritual path,these so-called sannyasins like Arpana and Lokesh would rather indulge in intoxicants and vilely slaver over books such as ‘New Age Bondage’ and ’50 Shades of Orange’, a story about a female disciple who is lured into the disgusting and depraved un-yogic practices of self-appointed therapriests who have abused the freedom that Osho has bestowed on them!
Gone are the great days of the commune when innocent young studs like Shantam went hunting religiously for the favours of the gora girls, with copies of ‘From Sex to Superconsciousness’ in their pockets, and sowed the seeds of mighty Bharat far and wide in an attempt to spread Oshos vision to all corners of this lotus Earth!
As Shantam has wisely pointed out in a recent post, it seems that the Anglo-Saxons are good at technical activities, like building railways and inventing medicine, but simply cannot understand the wisdom of the brownskins such as Jesus, Buddha and Osho!
They just do not get it!
Swami Bharat once said to me:
“You know, Yogi, enlightenment is like the clap.
You have either got it or you haven’t”
Well, I have got it, and so has Shantam!
Yahoo!
Hari Om!
The clap of one, or two hands clapping?
More great stuff, Yogi. Most amusing.
“Most amusing”?
Lokesh, do you think that the outpourings of the holy wisdom from my side, which are an extension of great men like Arun, Modi and Bharat, are for your amusement and the titillation of your mind and your genitals which seem, like all baboons, to be positioned very closely together?
Not at all!
The masters of Bharat have worked tirelessly to bring about Osho’s vision and you are just sitting there, doing nothing and demanding ‘amusement’!
It shows how far into the ditch, as Shantam has made clear, that Osho’s movement has fallen!
On matters more serious, important pieces of information are coming out about the meeting between Modi and Arun about how to make both India and Osho`s vision great!
I have heard that the important problem of homosexuals was broached.
The newly-crowned yogis were asked: “If a sattvic yogic meditator is approached by a homosexual should the devotee beat the homosexual off?”
The answer was unanimous, yogis should beat off homosexuals everywhere they encounter them, in ashrams, temples,in the street and in the home, and it should be done in a spirit of great enjoyment for it is the work of Rama!
Yahoo!
Hari Om!
And I agree with Madhu!
She is right to be shocked at the inconceivable arrogance of many of the contributors here who seem to have escaped from the baboon house of London Zoo!
Sannyasnews must be cleared of some of the perverted filth that is found here and must be made a haven for those who really understand what is what!
Yahoo!
Hari Om!
Thank you, Prem Martyn, for your honest correction relating to your quoting.
That´s kind of really important for me, as I am erupted without end by some others of the ‘contributors’ here, some of whom I simply cannot relate in any way to lovers of Osho – not in the past, present or any form of future sense, but rather to some kind of ‘churches’, like the ‘Scientology Church’ and its obnoxious, criminal ‘auditors’ and their pattern to flatline and terrorise others to big up their EGO as mission crusaders.
I loved when you – yesterday – found a word for that kind of contribution: like “internecine fighter”. I had to google that dictionary-wise and what I found there I felt fitting whenever I have been in shock about expressions of inconceivable arrogance, combined with leadership mentality here at this UK Internet chat-spot.
Times of chaos and confusion and lots of social changes happening, power games don´t spare any gathering of fellow-travellers to watch out not to give psychopaths in lust for power, influence.
The internet is full of that shit too – and I would love it if Sannyas News,
caravanserai, stays – as much as possible – and as awake as possible, out of these trends and being friends as fellow-travellers. Sharing is a value, precious too.
Madhu
Osho Barracks and Marine Camp
August Celebration and Fly-Past Parade
Memorandum: Staff Sergeant-Major ‘Sad-Tuff’ Dave
Now then, you ‘orrible bunch of no-hopers, today is the glorious day of our master gunner, ‘im what is known to us all as (sigh) ‘Bazza.’
Oh, so Mr Lance Bombardier Martyn thinks this is funny, does he? Well, I’m sure we’d all love to hear the joke – stand to attention, you ‘orrible little man, so that we might all delight in the moment…Wait for it, wait for it!!!! It’s people like you, you cloth-eared, limp-wristed excuse for a devotee…that makes a mockery of mindfulness. Oh yes, in my day you’d be polishing that halo-decked victim consciousness of yours till the light shone out yer arse…and another thing: the next time you’re caught whinging in the parade ground therapists’ Nissen hut you’ll be doing Dynamic until our beloved master reincarnates – and that’s AN ORDER!
Now line up in pairs and give each other a hug – not you, Bombardier Martyn, you haven’t earned yours, have you, you neti, neti boy?!
AT THE DOUBLLLLLLLLLLLE!!!!!!!!
Haha, I like it! That is “most amusing”, Swami Martyn, even veering on the pleasurably ‘Saturnian’ – mmm, very nice! In fact it’s brightened up my afternoon – why, I even caught (just in time) a smile beginning to take shape on my habitually deadly serious visage…
Yes, not bad at all for a chronically self-indulgent ‘victim’…If the TEFL world is too full of, er, “usury”, with talent like that I’m sure you could land a nice little clerical post somewhere…Might be ‘just the job’ for a wayward adolescent-in-his-late-50′s such as yourself…
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my daily ‘Love, Life, Laughter’ session on tv, ‘Police on Night Patrol’ (my favourite, you know), admirable chaps keeping the irresponsible, recalcitrant – and, of course, profoundly unconscious – under control) – loverly jubberly!
Yogi needs a 69 with someone from the West.
It will balance the chakras and open the world-view.
Shantam, it seems that you have been infected by your life in the pornocratic and spiritually empty wasteland of the West and indulging in revolting and unsattvic practices that you have seen whilst trawling the darknet!
Have you no shame?
What next in your decline into the baboonic cesspit?
I will not be surprised if the next step on your decline into the ditch of depravity leads you onto a homosexual parade through the streets of Germany, eating large amounts of German meat and enjoying the favours of several large German sausages nestling in your once-holy chuddies!
I undersatand that therapy is simply nonsense thought up by western therapriests to deceive and take money from the foolish baboons, and that those of us who were born in holy Bharat which has 5000 year history of enlightened ones, none of whom needed therapy, we also do not need this absurd mindgame of psychoanalysis!
Yet, I ask myself, has it ever occurred to you that the decline of the Osho movement, in your eyes, has occured in exactly the same time-frame as the decline of the functioning of your genital organs?!
That you feel yourself to be involved in a movement that once pointed gloriously to the stars but is now face-down in a permanent slump with no future is understandable!
I have consulted Arun and Bharat on the matter and their advice is clear!
Change has to come!
Renounce the habit of cheap, poor quality meat that you have developed in the perverted West and return to mighty Bharat!
Go to Rishikesh and find a real ashrama and avail yourself of a holy stick and, in time- honoured yogic fashion, beat the offending organ into submission!
Thus you will return the problematic ganglion to its true holy function by filling your yogic pint-pot with its divine nectar and imbibing deeply of the wisdom of Great India!
Yahoo!
Hari Om!
No hands and no clapping, Karima, especially not on an internet website.
And that´s very good news that there are some ‘nuggets’ that can not be abused ever, especially not with words and are free of any performance skills whatsoever.
It’s raining here today – what might be the sky you are looking at?
Nature is grateful here.
Madhu
Dear Madhu, the sky is clear as always, but sometimes it seems as if it has disappeared by too many clouds.
“SannyasNews must be cleared of some of the perverted filth that is found here and must be made a haven for those who really understand what is what!”
Hear, here.
Basically, SannyasNews is for those bunch of British/Scottish retirees who deep down did not need Osho for anything. It was the fashion to wear bell-bottoms and they purchased one too.
Thanks God, Buddha or Jesus did not get someone like them as followers!
Seems like Lokesh wants to create some kind of genocide!
Are you a jihadist, Lokesh Khan?
“Thank God, Buddha or Jesus did not get someone like them as followers!”
The word “followers” is significant here, one feels…
Careful, Shantam, those priestly robes of yours are showing….
Shantam.
Horrible genetic error,
or proof Nature has a sense of humour?
(Does it matter?
Do we care?)
٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶
?
Good to hear, Karima.
Congratulations.
Madhu
Thank you Madhu, but whatever for??
“(Does it matter?
Do we care?)”
It does matter, Arpana, it really does;
careless people though, do not know how to care.
And the latter has nothing to do with ‘Nature’, but sometimes with an adopted ‘second-life’ mentally distorted approach to the lifespan we are given as a gift – as the one and only – and as a chance.
When, if it was conveyed to us: “Live every moment and die to the past”, that didn´t mean to fuck up life and life´s expressions up to an extent that it is not recognizable any more – neither in its past forms nor the present form nor that there is any future coming out by that procedure, but destruction.
Madhu
PS:
Also the killing at the very bottom line of such habitual mental structures has become some virtual ‘exercise’ by now, hasn’t it?
Yawn.
Anand Yogi,
Come out from your projections and try to feel, Lokesh is not less worthy or awake in comparison with ‘your’ Arun or Bharat.
“Much of the cult of mindfulness is a reaction to technology.”
Want to escape the “cult of mindfulness”? Try NO-MIND! (just for the fun of it…).
The author asks: “If there is nothing new about meditation, why has it suddenly gone mainstream?” Maybe because mindfulness is not meditation and what is being pushed is mindfulness (full of mind?). Osho says meditation is not instrumental, not a strategy to use the mind or change the world or become more effective…much less to become ‘self-improving’.
Osho speaks of meditation as simply a state of being that is relaxed, aware and non-judgmental. It is a state of NO-MIND. Do any of these mindfulness teachers ever speak of no-mind? Is mindfulness as it is taught in mainstream society really just about being able to ‘think clearly’ … to achieve goals? Is mindfulness seen as a way to promote efficiency and get tasks done in corporate settings?
“The West has been thinking in terms of purpose, but the East has been thinking in terms of purposelessness. The East says life is not a business, it is a play. And a play has no purpose really, it is non-purposeful. Or you can say play is its own purpose, to play is enough. Life is not reaching towards some goal, life itself is the goal. It is not evolving towards some ultimate; this very moment, here and now, life is ultimate.”
Osho, ‘Vedanta: Seven Steps to Samadhi’
Right on, Kabir.
Could not agree more.
I like the article and agree with the points raised.
When in my investment bank I received an invitation to a Mindfulness Talk, I was very excited. I thought : “Wow, Bankers think they have a soul?”. I was VERY disappointed. Firstly, I didn’t know that Mindfulness went too corporate and naturally linked it to Tich Nhat Hanh’s movement that teaches Mindfulness but is open about it being linked to a Buddha himself. In my view, if enlightenment is a possibility, Tich Nhat Hanh is a pure representation of it – a simple flower, not a human being any more.
However, it was basically a sales pitch (by ex-bankers anyway) – very corporate, with numbers and graphs backing up the need of it. It was almost amusing. The purpose of it was to convince the miserable w…rs (sorry bankers) to sign up to private lessons and coaching (you can imagine the price? Pune’s competitors for sure…). The whole purpose of mindfulness, as it was presented, was to increase efficiency and productivity which is a goal of any investment bank.
Throughout the whole of the presentation, I was holding myself from the temptation to ask why are they masking an ancient method and now a religion as non-religious, brilliant corporate idea that will actually never work?
I think these people are taking people even further away of any possibility to meet the ‘real master’ and ‘find their soul’. It made me very sad. I could give you thousands of examples that makes it clear that the presenter never sat on their bottom even for an hour of meditation…
Blind leading the blind has never taken us anywhere and now it looks even more helpless because the blind is taking us into the opposite direction on top.
It is good to get a comment from someone who has actually experienced this mindfulness mularky. Thanks, Chetna for posting.
To me it would seem that some corporate guys are just ripping off the proper practice of meditation, which never has a purpose.
In the year leading up to taking sannyas I did TM twice a day, and Osho slated, dismissed T.M.
Well, speaking personally, I am convinced that year of TM opened me up and prepared me to recognise, for want of a bettter way of putting it, Osho when I met him.
Yes, Arpana, as I’ve said here before, I started up TM again in Poona itself, told Osho in a darshan, a little guiltily, who said it was ‘fine, no problem at all, go ahead’ (the gist of his comments). So I did, for another week or two, then it just sort of dropped away.
But during particularly difficult periods, I found it a very handy resource to fall back on, very beneficial for general health and clarity of mind, so I’ll never ‘knock’ it, except to say that I know very well it’s a ‘therapy’ rather than a genuine meditation.
Sometimes when I get caught up in something internally and cannot get re-centred, and being not centred drags on and on, I chant a mantra, and for a time that mantra was Osho, said over and over again.
Interesting, Chetna, but although I get what you’re saying, ie that this version of ‘mindfulness’ isn’t ‘real deal, 24 carat meditation’, I still say such a judgment is missing the point, which is that it’s a first step along the road of self-enquiry, self-awareness, ultimately of meditation, getting people to go inside and look at their habitual thoughts and feelings, what serves them and most important, what doesn’t and how to, hopefully, dissolve that.
Just because such corporate courses aren’t run in the context of what we’d call a ‘genuine spiritual search’ and don’t teach real meditation doesn’t really matter, as long as people find them practically useful in helping eliminate sources of unhappiness.
As Alok John said, who knows, perhaps a fair number of people who take such a course as ‘beginners’, might end up in ‘deeper waters’, if so moved? And so what, if they don’t, nothing will have been lost and many people will have been significantly helped, like the young man whose crippling schizophrenic condition improved hugely, transforming his whole life, thanks to learning ‘mindfulness’.
As for criticism of the term itself, well, it comes from ‘mindful’, to be aware, which is the object of the exercise, it’s about de-cluttering the mind and its harmful patterns through awareness, not about filling it to the brim with more information – or should be, from what I know about it.
Having said all that, if these corporate-sponsored courses somehow lead to or even advocate methods that might suppress healthy expression, eg of discontent, criticism of authority etc. then there would be a sinister element to them. Perhaps Chetna, you could comment on this, in your experience?
I have a feeling that the lady who has written the article has been to a similar course to mine, thus I totally get where she is coming from.
I was unaware of this mindfulness ‘thing’ going on. It seems there is a true meditation movement which takes different forms, and then there are these ‘smartarses’ using the same word.
All I can say that the course I went to had nothing to do with emotions, soul, search, depression, happiness – it was pure mind. How to make it work better, how to focus better, how to produce more in a shorter period of time. I had a sense that they were selling us a method of how to become better machines.
Also, they were selling it as a 10 min. fix because they know bankers have no time.
The very positive thing was that many people turned up to a course, which was lovely to see. As you guys say, just the intention and appreciation of the fact that the mind needs rest and care is a massive step. And then inshallah…
“Having said all that, if these corporate-sponsored courses somehow lead to or even advocate methods that might suppress healthy expression” – the course did no go that far or deep
” It seems there is a true meditation movement which takes different forms, and then there are these ‘smartarses’ using the same word.”
It would seem that way, Chetna. Finding value in ‘mindfulness’ I was referring to the former, certainly not the sort of corporate rubbish you were subjected to.
An example of true mindfulness, ie awareness, self-enquiry, as opposed to ‘corporate bullshine’, the Dalai Lama on his own mindfulness practice:
“Whether we are doing something good and worthwhile with our lives or not, time never waits but keeps flowing. Not only does time flow unhindered, but correspondingly our life too keeps moving onward all the time. If something has gone wrong, we cannot turn back time and try again. In that sense, there is no genuine second chance.
Hence, it is crucial for a spiritual practitioner constantly to examine his or her attitudes and actions. If we examine ourselves every day with mindfulness and mental alertness, checking our thoughts, motivations, and their manifestations in external behavior, a possibility for change and self-improvement can open within us.
Although I myself cannot claim with confidence to have made any remarkable progress over the years, my desire and determination to change and improve is always firm. From early morning until I go to bed and in all situations of life, I always try to check my motivation and be mindful and present in the moment. Personally, I find this to be very helpful in my own life.”
The Dalai Lama, ‘The World of Tibetan Buddhism’
“Although I myself cannot claim with confidence to have made any remarkable progress over the years.”
Such a revealing remark.
In the best possible way.
Mindfulness for War
“Meditation and deep breathing help slow the cognitive process and open us up to our more intuitive thoughts,” says retired SEAL commander Mark Divine, who developed SEALFit, a demanding training program for civilians that incorporates yoga, mindfulness and breathing techniques. He says some of his fellow SEALs became so tuned-in, they were able to sense the presence of nearby roadside bombs. Who doesn’t want that kind of Jedi mind power?
A good place to start: Practise what the SEALs call 4 x 4 x 4 breathing. Inhale deeply for four counts, then exhale for four counts and repeat the cycle for four minutes several times a day. You’re guaranteed to feel calmer on any battleground.”
That`s what happens when meditation goes mainstream.
Functional bits get used for ‘end-gaining’.
It happened in Japan.
Zen got roped in to the Samurai movement and those guys were scary killers doing breathing excercises etc. like these American Seals.
Did you know that the Shaolin monastery where Bodhidharma set up his martial arts shop is now
a huge military/police training complex churning out meditative and disciplined law-and-order killing machines for the Chinese govt?
If you feel that meditation is like a dance and that you do not do it in order to reach any particular place on the dancefloor but just for the joy of it, you probably don’t work in the corporate world or the security services.
You are probably a bit of an old freak like me!
Happy trails!
Frank…
Your name isn’t a certain F.Lowen who used to deliver pintas to Mrs L.Owen who lived next to Mr P.Marthowen who had that lovely website and flowering hanging basket arrangement over the front door of the local Therapeutic Trips and Charabang Holiday Excursions for the retired insightees? The driver was a lovely man who – oh, I forget his name…Olwen was it?…Or…anyway, me and Stan have decided to give all our realisations away to Charity this year….
Yogi, I have a question:
Is the buxom Italian actress who helped many men figure themselves out through the wisdom of Sophia and a Neapolitan cleavage related to the black gold medal runner who won in the 1936 Munich Olympics?
Could we at SN achieve similar feats of bioenergetic accomplishments and expanded chests of wisdom or should I just change my name?
Yours,
Rolf Harriswen
Dear Friends at Sannyas News,
And especially those who may be taking communication at a website as more a Game ( Frank?), or Charity box (Prem Martyn?) to donate to, or a kind of Olympic qualifying and qualified rating operation ( Parmartha?).
I would like to share some Sundays like today rereading another of the numerous recent posts from another point of view, as I still trust that I am not facing a machine (algorhythem-wise) when writing here or reading here.
The following quote comes from Avikal (14 June, 2014 – Oshonews.com) and also belongs here, I feel.
And Frank, you are not at all “an old freak” to stick to some essential values in the realms of what is called “meditation” in precarious times and their marketplace.
Madhu
“The trap
The Inner Judge is wily and full of tricks. What we get from the teaching and use ‘just’ for survival is a trick of the Inner Judge. Justifying our actions with our spiritual understanding is another trick of the Inner Judge. Assuming spiritual superiority is another trick of the Inner Judge. The bottom line is that ‘I know’ is the biggest trap that causes the soul to wither.
Boxes
Every time we feel satisfied that we have found a name for something, given it a definition, put it in a box … time after time … every time we blame the other or look for a saviour we throw the precious richness of our humanness to the winds and our soul withers.
The way is the goal
Often I hear people say that this path is difficult. It is true that growing up involves commitment, attention and willpower and that at times it is difficult to find resources inside. It is also true that only that which arises from our intelligence, love and dedication gives us satisfaction. Nothing else but that. And you know it all too well.
It is also this temporary difficulty that gives us a great and growing sense of integrity and trust, and that makes us feel, “Yes, this is finally me!”
‘You are not alone’
In discovering our Authentic Self we are not alone. All around us there are people who have taken the fundamental step of placing themselves at the centre of their own lives. This is not in the narcissistic way of the ego that believes and expects that everything revolves around itself. It is for those who, forged by the fire of the responsibility of their own evolution, have the courage to ask themselves over and over again, “What has all of this to do with me?” These are the ones who turn their attention within; they turn their awareness and their energy within, too, and in doing so stop looking outside for answers, reasons, justifications.
And only then they find true understanding and meaning, immediately, magically, in the Self that is Truth.
The statement, “And the Truth will make You Free” makes sense only if YOU know yourself as the embodiment of Truth, if the teaching is not just words and concepts but living practice of your attention and flowering of your passion. Then The Truth makes Us Free, as We are Truth, Freedom and Contentment.
This is our true Nature.”
Avikal – 14 June, 2014
Perfectly right, Madhu!
The baboon and obsessive ranker, Parmartha, with his absurd therapriest-Olympics shows the utterly depraved mind of the sport-obsessed West, which is obsessed with endless ranking!
What next?
‘Sannyas Has Got Talent’?
or ‘What would have happened if Osho had been on the X-factor?’
And his support for the bronze medallist shows how essentially third-rate the whole third-rate enterprise of Sannyas, as based in the baboon house of London Zoo, has become!
And this revolting, cynical old freak-dog Frank, who urinates shamelessly on the holiest of thrones and, as you make clear, seems to think that the road to enlightenment is some kind of game and a joke, needs to feel the full force of your Zen-stick.
Unlike the newly-crowned yogi, N. Modi, who is the embodiment of Zorba the Buddha, as Arun has declared, this depraved baboondog Frank has probably spent his life in a whole catastrophe of doing a series of menial tasks, drinking heavily, chasing women, playing tricks on holy seekers, dancing and loafing on beaches, telling stories and blagging money from wealthy Englishmen and generally larging it up!
It is a disgrace!
And your guru, this therapriest Avikal, who claims that he knows that “to say “I know” is the biggest trap”, has clearly caught his own well-fed buttocks in the very same “I know” trap!
Ha! These would-be therapriest gurus!
They do not know of what they speak!
They should hurl themselves at the feet of Arun or my own guru, Swami Bharat, who said to me only last week,
“You know, Yogi, therapists are like the clap.
Once they enter your life, they are pretty hard to shake off.”
Hari Om!
Yahoo!
Oh dear, Chaps.
You appear to be failing to live up to Madhu’s expectations.
Pull yourselves together!!!
Whilst on the subject of madfulness, I’m sure everyone here would love to know that the Search inside Yourself Leadership Intelligence programme (it’s not called SYLI for nothing eh?) has been taught at Google since 2007 in tandem with ongoing EQ development (and which I have brought to the discussion arena in my own adult language courses – we discuss, then make paper aeroplanes, then recycle the paper out of the photocopies).
On a similar and not unconnected note, Tony Robbins, the coaching voice of America is an ex-marine and John Grinder, the NLP meister wordsmith and one of its originators, was trained in linguistics and semantic rigmarole from those self-help, self-slapping-thwacking Jesuits: “Being trained by Jesuits, John was instructed by Jesuits for four years, during University, from the ages of 18 to 22. Jesuits are superb at argumentation and the structure of reasoning. John “admitted” he loves to argue with them.” (source: http://users.telenet.be/merlevede/john.htm ).
I agree, btw, all the tomfoolery is just shocking, terrible, very childish, unless authorised. And who is it who starts all this? I agree – Parmartha and Frank. Honestly – tut, tut, tut. Come on boys, you ought to know better….