dharmapunx NYC

In 1976 Richard Dawkins made the interesting observation that ideas—such as views, fashions, beliefs, practices, theories—behaved like genes: the successful ones survive. Concepts that thrive are not necessarily the benevolent, but simply the ones that spread and adapt well with their host ecosystem: human minds. Thoughts that survive are not always in our best interest; some ideas—selfish, fearful, biased ideations—thrive by engaging the most fearful regions the brain, driving us to distraction via conscious repetition, while activating and tensing our underlying sympathetic nervous system.  Some concepts, difficult to defend in isolation, endure because they interact well with other views and opinions. For example: ‘there should be no limits to how much an individual can accumulate and consume’ is difficult to defend when examined alone, but it integrates well with other ideas prevalent in capitalist environments, and so it perseveres. As genes are a set of instruct...

We are always evolving, for that is our nature. Our breath, sensory awareness, gut feelings, level of conscious awareness, the content of our thoughts—all that constitutes our present experience and internal landscape—are shifting and flowing. Yet while we live, speak and listen from a perceptual vantage points that are unstable, our innate disposition is to staunchly protect our views, tastes and opinions, even to the point of feeling threatened by other beliefs and world views. This rigidity and defensiveness can be seen as the root of all conflict and disputes, as the Buddha taught in the wonderful “Ball of Honey Lesson” ( Madhupindika Sutta, MN 18): “When we give up our attachment to our views and opinions, we become less obsessive and caught up in our identity views; this in turn brings about a release from the passions that fuel arguments, accusations and lies that in turn lead to violence and unskillful behavior.”  Detaching from ones thoughts and v...

A busy life can be experienced as an addictive video game, comprising the twisty route from a morning coffee to the time we return home and close the door on the world and its demands. The circuit is strewn with pleasant opportunities—friendly conversations—which we navigate toward, and unpleasant roadblocks—impossible characters with impractical deadlines—which we try to avoid. Caught up in the game, our frustrations and disappointments are stifled so we can keep moving. We lose track of how these blocked emotions translate into stress carried in the body. Our external fixation and continual thoughts relegate the body to the corners of awareness, and the ten sion that lies beneath our attention spans often remains unnoticed. Yet these physically stored emotions play a greater role in the course of our days than we expect. Not only do stored emotions create the pressure that lies beneath a sudden verbal outburst, they cause the urgency behind rash decision. They a...

Learning to find real meaning, authenticity and peace in life requires developing some control over over how we use the mind, where we focus our attention. What this means is establishing conscious, staying awake, rather than drift off into the social media daze or the mind's dark cineplex of reconstructed memories, plans for the future. Our lives, we may have heard, do not arise out of a wonderfu l, exciting narrative laced with inspired goals or memorable missions, where some divinity has established a great purpose for ourselves, our families, our country; our species, like all other species, exists with a preset "purpose" (if we can call it that), which is merely to survive and continue the species on and on, which is hardly an ambition or a particularly worthy goal. So its our job to make something more of it. We establish some semblance of raison d'etre via our thoughts and actions; rather than reciting the same cultural ideas in our heads that have been impl...

The current deluge of zombie flicks, tv shows, graphic publications and video games, not to mention an incalculable array of of consumer products from T shirts to halloween get ups document our cultural fascination with animated bodies that  move about without conscious, driven only by frantic, subhuman cravings. The idea of zombies has been found in African and South American cultures for hundreds of years. In 1932 a Bela Lugosi’s ‘White Zombie’ was a huge success for an independent film, finding box office success in both small town cinemas and big cities. In 1974 the great Nigerian, afrobeat singer Fela scored his success with the album and track ‘Zombie,’ using it as a metaphor for the Nigerian military. While the idea of an unknown force taking over the mind is a staple of the horror genre, the idea is actually neither ludicrous nor far fetched. In philosophy, zombies are thought experiments used to discuss the degree to which conscious awareness is separate from the physic...

The Buddha's teaching on how suffering arises in life, Paticca-Samuppada , has no obvious translation; it is often referred to as the “Chain of Dependent Origination.” which is an ungainly phrase at best. Regardless of its clunky title, it presents a profound, psychological theory of the mind as a causal environment (a realm of karma), and it lies at the core of the 2,500 year old dharma. There is nothing mystical about the Buddha’s theory, it is an intriguing and systemic series of observations, as rigorous as William James or Von Helmhotlz; as original for its time as the work of Freud, Wertheimer, Bowlby and Ainsworth. Rather than review this insight in its entirety, it is worthwhile to highlight the key mechanisms. For such an endeavor we'll review a simple, run of the mill event in daily life, and explore, from the perspective of Buddhist insight, how it can blossom into full blown mental agitation and affliction. Road rage: beginning the chain of suffering To s...

There’s a great deal of societal emphasis on presenting life as a competitive encounter, a challenge to see ‘who can reach the sweet life in time to grab the goodies, for there’s only so much stuff left to go around.’ And dwindling social safety nets, spiraling healthcare costs and constant pressures to perform amidst educational institutions and workplaces add untold stress to the mind which, by default, is already set up to fret and worry. After all, our brains have the same structure, regions and circuits as they did roughly 40 - 50,000 years ago, which was the last time we humans had an evolutionary transformation—and during those times the brain’s wiring was set up to survive each day without being eaten. You’d think we’d be calmer now that we’ve attained the dominant species status, but we’re living in the same cognitive set up, only we’ve replaced outrunning wild animals with the stresses of a go-for-the-gold rat race; an unfriendly expression on a supervisor’s face can ...

Waking up into life is liberating. It's how we stop the war with the way things are, and find a way to embrace life as it is, rather than how we'd prefer it to be. It is an attainable state; clarity is not reserved for monks and nuns alone. When life becomes stressful, obligations and responsibilities weigh heavily, its tempting to resist the pressures by falling into dissociative diversions; escape fantasies, illusions of martyrdom, head trips, blame games and on. The path to stability and clarity becomes hard to find when we're at war with the fleeting experiences life has presents us. Peace begins when we give up the fight.  Waking up doesn't mean fixing or solving all of life's challenges. Waking up can involve stepping back from the trance of busyness, to allow events to unfold on their own, creating space for new information to arrive in our awareness. We can can step out of the spiral of assigning fault in self or others by examining the expectatio...

Some of my earliest childhood memories feature a series of what seemed to be unendurable debates my parents assailed over the spiritual values of securing good incomes and the rewards and pitfalls wealth produced from one’s work and career. Such arguments were more than idle intellectual concerns; both my parents were first generation Americans who grew up amidst considerable poverty, and their sentiments toward finances revealed deeper issues involving both assimilation and the existential purpose of life itself. My father, for many years a Zen Buddhist who started his practice in the early 70s, came to view the post 60s era as far too object-oriented and consumerist by nature, at odds with his veneration of the heroic, anti-materialist abstract painters and jazz musicians he venerated. From this vantage, financial concerns were profane affairs that distracted from one’s deepest purpose in life: creating art and attaining peace through meditation. He quit his job as a “...

Spree shopping, binging, sales hunting, ceaseless consumerism. These are forms of intoxication , the act of a mind that seeks relief, through external distractions, from the nagging worries and fears that are kept barely suppressed. Shopping is the approved addiction of capitalist countries; during weekends the streets of commerce districts and pedestrian malls jammed, the plazas filled, with patrons lugging bags adorned with the gods of materialism: Armani, Marc Jacobs, Hugo Boss, Gucci and on. Shortly after the towers fell during 9/11, when a populace was traumatized and fearful, seeking a way to interpret the unfathomable, what were the messages we received from so many elected officials? ‘Keep shopping.’ Apparently consumerism is our way of telling an undefined enemy ‘we’re strong and resilient.’ Today, amidst all the vulnerabilities and discomfort we face living in a country with no safety net, unaffordable healthcare, cutthroat competition for work, we’re bombarded ...