Just back from an amazing interview with Clifford Saron, director of the Shamatha Project, which studied the benefits of calming-the-mind meditation common to several religious traditions. They have data and positive results, and a whole slew of papers about to hit the shelves.
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Hope we'll get to read (hear?) the interview soon! Thought you and might be interested in these interviews with Shamatha Project folks:
Katherine MacLean:
http://www.thesecularbuddhist.com/episode_023.php
Clifford Saron:
http://www.thesecularbuddhist.com/episode_028.php
and Contemplative Director B. Alan Wallace:
http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2008/03/bg-062-reverberations-from-the-shamatha-project/
This more contentious interview is interesting too:
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/archive/podcastinfo.aspx?mid=1&pid=73
I really appreciate Wallace's efforts to promote calming/concentration/jhana/shamatha/samadhi, which seems to have been undervalued. I'm glad to see teachers like Wallace, Ajahn Brahm, Larry Rosenberg, and Pa Auk Sayadaw emphasizing this facet of meditative practice- a nice counterbalance to the ubiquitous "choiceless awareness"-style mindfulness.
Open awareness has it's value, but I'm betting we could all benefit from more concentration. I read somewhere that Chogyam Trungpa started Pema Chodron back at square one with shamatha when she became his student even though she was already an ordained nun and accomplished meditator. One can't have too strong a grounding in the basics.
Shamatha could be especially useful for combating "Continuous Partial Awareness." As Alain de Botton wrote recently:
"The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.
...
"The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting."
Mark Fisher's post here has more on the topic:
"The constant craving to be connected, or to click through to the next link, or to check to see if mail has arrived, is intensely demanding: cyberspace is a hard taskmaster, and one that is never satisfied (and which, similarly, leaves us feeling dissatisfied any drained)."
Fisher is quite critical of meditation ( http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004153.html ), but I can't help but wonder if a touch of shamatha wouldn't help all of us afflicted with "twitchy, agitated interpassivity." Maybe this is the next step Zizek's call to withdraw needs to take: "Don't Just Do Something!"
http://www.shambhalasun.com/sunspace/?p=11833
P.S. Thanks for posting all 3 MLA talks! So much to chew on there.
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