It is an incredible privilege to be able to say that Kyabjé Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche was my teacher. In honor of the 16th anniversary of his passing, here are a few stories about some of the time I spent with him. 

Jealousy is a painful emotion, in part, because when we get jealous we lose our self-respect. It is deeply embarrassing to watch ourselves feel displeasure at the happiness and good fortune of others, whether it be their wealth, physical attributes, money...whatever.

I suppose, if we look at it in one way, it is good news that we feel disturbed when we feel jealous. This shows that we have a conscience – that in truth we really do want others to be happy and don’t want to feel uncomfortable about their good fortune. And yet we experience this inner-conflict.

Jealousy comes from feeling impoverished in our own minds. We wish we possessed the attributes that belong to someone else…therefore we feel we “lack” something in some way. So jealousy comes from being totally self-focused. Herein lies the problem.

In my last post I wrote about how we can find a common ground between the many different approaches to meditation. Today I want to share a list of questions that might be useful to ask ourselves to clarify our practice, regardless of what kind of meditation we may be practicing.

Twenty five hundred years ago, Gautama Siddhartha, the historical Buddha, had some deep insights and created powerful techniques that would allow major reductions of human suffering.  Traditionally the Buddha is said to found a total end to all suffering.  Perhaps that's true, perhaps it's not.  I don't know, but certainly Buddhist meditation techniques and related practices can greatly reduced individuals' suffering.

 From that time on, to greatly oversimplify, you can talk about two main streams of Buddhist activity.  The heart of Buddhism is the monastic tradition, monks and nuns so dedicated to achieving enlightenment for their own sakes and for the sake of others that they devote their entire lives to living in ascetic conditions and practicing meditation and prayer.  The other main stream is the beliefs of the common people, in essence, that the Buddha was some kind of god, or at least had supernatural abilities, as the monks and nuns also do to various degrees.  These people were too busy trying to survive and  earn a living, and so could not meditate very much themselves, but they could earn merit, which would go toward improving their future lives, by worshiping the Buddha and by supporting the monks and nuns with alms and other donations.  I'm speaking very generally, of course, and you can find many variations on these themes.

Whales - with their dramatic presence and playful spirit - always captivate my attention.  Suddenly, all my thoughts drop away.  My mind is wholly attuned to watching the water, waiting for the next appearance of these magnificent creatures.

When this happens, it's almost as though meditation has naturally dawned in my mind. Wouldn't it be wonderful if meditation were always so easy?

Sogyal Rinpoche says that meditation is really a process of non-judgemental awareness.

In the previous 2 posts of this series we looked at some of the pillars of quantum physics: the measurement problem & quantum entanglement and the way both can be demonstrated in the infamous double slit experiment. There we saw that the way an experiment is carried out seems to determine what we measure - an objective reality is nowhere to be seen, in other words: a conscious observer influences the result of a quantum measurement.

Let's take this one step further: In this post I'd like to demonstrate that on the quantum level even the law of cause and effect seems to break down.

When I was in Boston a month or so ago, I got a chance to visit with Marvin Minsky. Professor Minsky was the co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT and one of the pioneers in the field of computer science and robotics.

Since the early 1950s, Marvin Minsky has worked on using computational ideas to characterize human psychological processes, as well as working to endow machines with intelligence. In the early 1970s, Minsky and Seymour Papert began formulating a theory called The Society of Mind which combined insights from developmental child psychology and their experience with research on Artificial Intelligence. The Society of Mind proposes that intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism, but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents.

So I thought it might be fun to ask him some questions about what is the “sense of self”, awareness and consciousness.