Meditation Galveston Island

08/14/2024

"In meditation, silence comes on its own accord. You simply go on watching the mind without any control, without any repression, and silence comes suddenly just like a breeze, and with the silence, the fragrance of the flowers – that is your blissfulness." - Osho ✨🪷

07/12/2024

Goswami Kriyananda 📿
Becoming a mystic means you can effectively change your past and your future. Happiness is a byproduct of your lifestyle, so learn to live a lifestyle of sanity

03/05/2024

08/25/2023

Lojong is the path to Bodhichitta
Submitted by Terry Conrad (copyrighted)2023

Necessary & Important
If something is necessary, it's also important. When what is necessary is no longer important, we put ourselves at risk. The environment is necessary to sustain Life, yet economic ambitions and neglect can cause its importance to be compromised. A mature caring connection with each other is necessary for our shared survival, yet we find excuses or distractions causing us to ignore it's importance. Without caring and cooperative connections with each other we experience personal suffering, environmental degradation, fractured relationships, and social disparity.
Religious and political tenets, the products of ancient spirituality, scientific, and philosophical inquiry, have long served as a source of communal values and the connecting fabric for social discourse. Unfortunately, endemic social and ethnic bias caused by self-cherishing notions that the institution is more important than our connection with each other has led to abuses of power and conflict. Attempts at a world order are doomed by self-cherishing agendas excluding anyone as 'different.'
Social connection and cooperation free of bias is possible when we recognize the universal Nature of innate Goodness and Wholeness of our being human. Goodness, our innate Virtue; and Wholeness, the symbiotic interconnected and interdependent Nature that we're already complete having the capacity to grow and mature mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Regardless of cultural or ethnic differences we share an essential humanity that experiences joy and sorrow, shares the same vulnerability to illness and injury, has the capacity to love and be loved, and the ability to be free of suffering. Recognizing how interconnected and interdependent we are with each other and universe deepens the appreciation of our shared survival and the importance of connection regardless of appearance or station.
Maturity deepens with the respect for how we feel without blame, justification, rationalization, or attitude about who, what, or why. Feelings are caused, constructed from Life experiences offering us wisdom as insight. Irritation reveals a preference, an attitude, assumption, or expectation. As children we simply react to feelings, blaming someone or something else. As maturity, we take responsibility for how we feel, able to see our part and make a choice how to respond. It's seems natural to have a bias or preference for what's familiar or pleasant. It's seems natural to have certain assumptions and opinions about things, this is conditioning. Conditioned preferences, assumptions, and expectations, patterns of thoughts and feelings in response to Life experiences, can cause hurt, disappointment, frustration, anger even resentment if not closely monitored. As a matter of course we go along with the opinions, attitudes, and beliefs of others, or from things we've heard or read, without the benefit of contemplating the affect they have on our wellbeing.
For us to be whole, healthy, happy, and free it's necessary and important to take responsibility for our mental, emotional, and spiritual maturity, to examine if what we assume or believe is true rather than relying on self-cherishing habits of negativity. Mental and emotional habits can be helpful or harmful, the conscious work of training the mind through contemplative and meditation practices offers discernment, patience, Compassion, and Wisdom. In Buddhism this is called training in Bodhichitta, (awakened mind) our capacity to discern accurately and love unconditionally and thereby free ourselves from the bo***ge of self-cherishing. Freedom, a conscious choice about how we feel, think, say, and do.

Project Clear Light – 2218 Postoffice Street – Galveston, TX 77550 © Terry Conrad – 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the
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from Terry Conrad

08/19/2023

This mind that you are carrying in your head has arisen over centuries. Your small mind carries the whole experience of humanity, and not only of humanity - of animals, of birds, of plants, of rocks.

You have also passed through all those experiences. All that has happened up to now has happened in you also. In a very small nutshell, you carry the whole experience of existence. That’s what your mind is.

In fact, to say it is yours is not right. It is collective. It belongs to us all.

02/15/2023

Modern meditation practice or what we may have lost!

Meditation " officially " landed in America In the late 1930s and 1940s, its Ellis Island was the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago Illinois, a star wars-like salon of exotic spiritual and religious teachers from every corner of our round globe .
By today's standards its growth was slow.
The 'Beat's' or beat generation led by luminaries such as D.T. Suzuki and later Alan Watts with followers the likes of the now deceased Alan Ginsberg popularized Zen and Introduced many to ideas of Buddhism.
In the late 1960s and 1970s meditation began to enter the culture at large and gain enormous momentum notably thru the influence of the Beatles, there were many others..

Meditation at present has taken on a distinctly American face, Gone are the mysterious looking men with their lion king looks , long flowing robes and a look of profound calm.
Its new evangelists are presenters of TED TALKS, podcasters, lifestyle coaches and previously closeted meditators with degrees in neuro-science. no longer a spiritual practice, rather fractionated into its useful derivatives such as relaxation, stress reduction, health benefits, lowering BP, stimulating creativity, increasing productivity ... and now the latest pitch… . longevity.

Meditation has also gotten mixed in with a number of similar practices such as visualization, affirmation, contemplation, prayer etc. these are not strictly meditation but rather practices of their own namesake.

If you were lucky to be around and engaged in the youth movement and cultural exchange of the 60s and 70s you would recall the excitement of every new possibility attending every new teacher arriving on our shores with their secret methods of breathing, ancient techniques of mind control, obscure mantras and initiations into lineages thousands of years old!
If nothing else we were learning that human potential was greater, vaster and more self empowered then we could have imagined at the time .

While on the face of it these seemingly different styles did share a commonality of principles and Objectives. If nothing else what we learned is :
Spiritual growth was is the hands of every individual
Every being was " divine " at their core
The solution to a lifetime of struggle and effort could be achieved by first cultivating inner peace
Human consciousness has many levels of awareness, higher levels of awareness gave greater psycho - emotional freedom.
We did not have to be subjugated and subservient to the mind.
Self realization was the first step to self mastery.
And the most radical idea, (at the time) god ( existence ) was within, not outside of ourselves.

The meditation practices of the time attributed its techniques to one of the two major approaches to spiritual evolution.
A direct intervention and or modification of the mind, thinking and thought processes.
The second is the manipulation of the chakras and kundalini, the fundamental way the body/ mind initiates and integrates change.

The general objectives of meditation.

Stilling the mind, quieting the noise and distraction in our head.
Altered states of consciousness : ie
astral projection
time space travel
mild hallucinatory states

Manipulate kundalini and chakras to cultivate mystical experience.

On to the higher objectives ie
Self-mastery
Self realization
Transcendence, exploring levels of consciousness called in Sanskrit the Koshas
(the various subtle bodies)

Expansion of awareness , including sensory awareness.

To the more sublime states ie.
Samadhi (various levels)
Enlightenment, The highest peak of human development .

Fundamentally, the intention of meditation was a rather complex systematic and scientific approach to the exploration, development and evolution of human potential.
Now, much of what has been described above may not currently be on your checklist but these potentials are still there for the exploration.
Om shanti shanti shanti

12/14/2022

Beliefs: a mirror of the mind

Humans imagine that what they imagine is true .

I have been endlessly fascinated by the various examples of how easy it is for Illusionists,
graphic artists, photographers, puzzles, sound engineers et el to trick, mislead, and even manipulate us into seeing, hearing and even believing in things that aren't true or for that matter even exist. Scientists have created numerous illusions to have us feel pain, temperature or other sensations by stimulating fake body parts.
Linguist experts and for that matter marketers know exactly how to set us up for a predicted outcome or conclusion.
Social media, thru exposure and repetition are very effective at changing our language, preferences, even our ethics sometimes in a matter of hours or days.
When it comes to perceiving reality human cognition is a poor tooI or resource.
Yet at any given moment we are utterly convinced about our particular point of view, and that it is correct and true.
I would like to suggest here that rather than start argument, create a war, become rigidly defensive or be offended by others beliefs there is something even more useful and instructive.
Beliefs, positions, and attitudes are very effective in understanding our own mind, values
conditioning and psychology. In short they are a mirror.
For example
Let's take the question
Is/does the universe, life, have uIimate meaning, purpose, is it organized ?!
Or, is it random, subject to mutability without determining predisposition, maybe even morality.
The probability is that your response is consistent with your emotional comfort zone.
if you require stability, certainty and see life as a Iinear progression you would pick the first option.
If you are comfortable with randomness, spontaneity, creating your own meaning and value,
respond to change easily and may not see things in terms of either or, the probability is high that you would pick option 2 or more easily be comfortable.
This phenomenon is happening everywhere in our lives, but we are unaware.
We go on imagining that what we imagine is true.
Now this is a blog about meditation and spirituality so what is the relevance of this article.
Well one profound intention of meditation is Awareness and in particular the freedom and clarity that comes when we are able to see ourselves and life as it is. What the Buddists call
Tathātā.
One important meditation exercise is to just watch the mind, watch where it goes, particularly in response to any bodily sensation and then watch how we build a meaning around that automatic response to a sensation. I think we are all familiar with how quickly the mind can turn a symptom into a life threatening condition, what's more is we do it over and over no matter how frequently we have been misdirected by our very own thought process and unawareness. Tathata is the antidote.

10/27/2022

planned human evolution
we have all learned about the development of our species and the life forms attending that phenomena, we collectively refer to this as evolution.
As a slow and seemingly random process it's hard (but fun) to speculate where we are headed , emotionally, physically and intellectually.
In the short term we could conjecture that we would at least become better humans, better at things we are already good at and maybe even some of those things we're not so good at, like jealousy, aggression etc.
Long before the advent of Western psychology there had been a robust consideration and development of the topic. In fact, human development and evolution was at the very heart of what we would call Eastern spirituality. Unlike most western religions which place an emphasis on salvation, reward punishment and the after life.
These philosophies and disciplines were concerned with how to understand, manage, direct and accelerate our individual evolution. To that end they explored and developed an extensive psychology of not only human behavior but also human potential, that is to say human capabilities, and here it must be said that what they discovered far exceeds what we in the west have yet to fully grasp and appreciate .
Much of what the ancient thinkers discovered & developed thousands of years ago are now just being explored and researched by modern disciplines of psychology, neurology and behaviorism. If you'd like to take a deep dive I recommend you explore ‘Buddhist psychology’.
I suspect that this is a major divergence of the 2 dominant cultural approaches, that of the Hindu Buddhist and Judeo Christian Islamic world views.
In Fact these ancient far East Ideas had a profound impact on western culture in the 1960's and 1970s they were a driving force in the Human potential movement.and awakened an entire generation to a new and radical approach to living.
That generation rejected the idea that humans were inherently bad (sinners) that the body was an object of shame, that desires should be repressed, that we should follow quietly and unquestioningly and that success and fulfillment was in the hands of some divinity or supernatural phenomena. if, you prayed or supplicated enough.
And that was just the half it.
Drugs, meditation, communal living, music, experimental therapies became the cornerstones for a postmodern era culture.
These eastern spiritual ideas took root quickly and the driving force was a concept completely new to the west and that was to "know oneself" to live fully and richly to take risks but most of all to look inward.

05/26/2022

5 days before you were born
Ever notice yourself or others acting as if the universe had just formed about 5 days before you were born.
It's akin to the sensation or perspective that the universe revolves around us.
We tend to think and operate as if we are the first to discover an idea,
the first person to understand a concept or imagine that an experience, situation or condition is new and unique, and special to us.
Hilarious when you think about it.

The development of every child necessarily begins with this condition and every parent grapples with this situation and in fact due to their love and attention can even contribute to it.
This in many ways is the formation of the identity, sense of self and when a child is supported thru this developmental stage they can then begin the next developmental stage where there is the recognition of the "other" .
It's true and obvious that to a greater or lesser degree this self-referential perspective persists through our lifetime.
But social success in life is connected to the ability to externalize our attention, to include more of the world.
In the parlance of spiritual philosophies and practices this is referred to as the ‘ego’ and where there is an imbalance of self to others it is called narcissism.
The narcissism here is not the pathological type as found in dictators, politicians or the overinflated ego of a film star but it has many of but to a lesser degree limitations that are associated.
Now this condition is quite normal and is the heart of the matter for the spiritual practitioner.
It is where, how and why the journey begins.
The ego and the identity is intimately and profoundly connected with survival and its function is self perpetuation, it will and does anything to assure it.
We can all relate to the experience of danger, physical or emotional threat etc.
We hate being told what to do, we hate being wrong, we avoid isolation….. it's a major force behind our search for love and acknowledgement.
Now contrast this with our desire for freedom, autonomy.
It's a dance that's hard to dance and we all know that the music will ultimately stop.
The ego then is profoundly useful and limiting!
it's the limiting and self contractive part that we are trying to overcome or even transcend.
So the spiritual practitioner takes up battle against themselves, trying to control, dominate the very thing required for survival, sounds impossible! The dilemma of the ages.
The historic solution has always started with meditation.
Meditation because it slowly and gently reveals to us that we are attached to our identity but we in fact are not our identity and further the identity or sense of self is insubstantial.

05/09/2022

Suffering
It is said that Gautama the Buddha has described the fundamental Condition of life for human beings as a condition of "suffering"(dukka).
When I first read and explored this idea in my late teens(1960s) there was something very reassuring about this precept .
Sounds a bit strange but it was useful and validating to know that what I was feeling was a condition not only as old as ancient history but a subject worthy of discussion by the Buddha.
I felt understood and normal, not a common feeling for many at that age and at that time in history.
As I continued to read and learn about 'Eastern philosophy in general and Buddhism in specific I noticed that there were philosophers. translators, scholars and even some Buddhist teachers that debated the interpretation and preferred Instead of "suffering" a variety of other synonyms word/concepts.
But, as far as I was concerned the word suffering was right on the mark and I felt no need to redefine the meaning whatsoever .
In fact I wondered if it was more a case of personal discomfort or denial by said authors.
Of course I came to realize that perhaps suffering didn't fit their experience, especially if they were now more developed, prosperous, or mature (than I was at the time ) or for that matter had moved onto another developmental stage allogether.
In the succeeding years of reflection I have come to see that the state the Buddha was describing may have been more applicable to that specific era, (6th century BCE) than to life in the postmodern era.
Consider life at the time of Buddha, life was mostly consumed with survival, life expectancy was ½ to ⅓ what it is today. Medicine and surgery, if even available needless to say, was not nearly as developed or effective. Long hours in the fields just to feed oneself, poor survival rate for newborns, famine, war, very little in the way of pleasurable distractions or personal freedom and self expression, well you get the point. I'm guessing food, shelter and safety were senior concerns to being happy or validated, getting attention or becoming a millionaire.
So in the 21st century how would the text read, would Buddha define the precept differently?
Much has changed in our now era of abundance.
I suspect our ancestors, however difficult their life was, were very grounded, occupied and focused, they knew who they were, who was responsible and what needed to be done. History books show us that mental illness, depression, su***de, loneliness, anxiety and identity and maybe even sexual ambiguity are mostly conditions that have evolved and multiplied as we have evolved culturally socially and economically. Alongside these problems there are a host of new threats to our well being depending on where you live in the world. Statistics for cancer, heart disease, obesity or diabetes are increasing faster than our ability to respond. At the same time we have unprecedented number of distractions and denials from 24 hr. cable tv, YouTube to having a mobile device just inches from our nose, we no longer have to face our condition, have a drink take a pill and repent to yourself "its all good"
I suspect today the language would be different, Something like" squirming' and boy do we squirm. Never at ease, never at rest, no longer know who we are, what has meaning or what is to be done.
No, I don't think life for a modern human is a life of suffering, just a whole lot of squirming.