Life as a serious lay meditator

These are some of the factors I found to be helpful in developing the Noble Eightfold Path as a lay person .

1) Slowing down -  Our usual pace of washing the dishes, putting on clothes and shoes etc, if slowed down to gentle movements can possibly be efficient in increasing mindfulness.
2) Contemplation of cessation- Mindfulness is difficult to sustain in ordinary life and instead of looking at it as a difficulty, one can turn in to an opportunity for insight. For instance, if we are not able to mindful in a flowing and smooth manner whilst carrying out daily activities, noting the moments of distraction and mindfulness as uncontrollable is easier than trying really hard to be mindful every moment.
 3) Seclusion- This is probably the most important factor but if one cannot live alone, allotting a specific time to be away from the crowd is optimal.
4) Anapanasati- Doing a retreat and trying to meditate after a busy day at work is quite the opposite. While in a retreat, samatha practice is not needed per se to establish mindfulness and have clear-headedness. Doing walking meditation and Anapanasati before Vipassana is beneficial as a lay practitioner having limited time for formal meditation.
5) Fortune favors the brave- As a lay person, it is easy to drift into a mode of contentment with little meditation and other distractions of the world. So whenever a couple of off-days are available, doing meditation all night with a few hours of sleep (4 max) is a great way in staying in touch with the teachings of the Buddha.

There might be other positive things to do as a lay meditator as things work differently for different people. Best to remain mindful, eating the right amount and cultivate the bojjhanga as best as possible.

May all beings be free from suffering. 

Vipassana and Concentration

A person new to Satipatthana Meditation almost always wonders,"How do I be mindful every moment?"

The answer is, consciousness is not yours and is not under your control all the time.

"Wonderful, indeed, it is to subdue the mind, so difficult to subdue, ever swift, and seizing whatever it desires. A tamed mind brings happiness."- Dhammapada verse 35

The aim of Vipassana is to see things clearly - i.e. the three characteristics of reality namely Impermanence, Unsatisfactoriness and Ownerlessness- not concentration!

Concentration comes along with the bundle of application of the mind to the object and it is not the final goal. The final goal is wisdom that comes from seeing things as they really are.  However, tricky the mind maybe, tricks can be used to not let the mind wander too much. And if it does, bringing it back gently to the present moment is the best solution rather than cribbing about the moment of not being mindful.

The trick is: At every moment, there is usually more than one thing that we can be choose to be aware of. Still, I do not mean that there is more than one thing happening in the mind at one instant. But since we get the notion of wanting to concentrate on the present moment rather than seeing it clearly, we limit the spectrum of our experience. For instance, when you are standing at the bus stop, acknowledging standing is the usual noting procedure and thereby when the mind wanders, we see it as a distraction as opposed to an object of contemplation. When we see sensual objects, we forget that we can acknowledge seeing. When we stand, there is pressure in the legs that we can be aware of. We can be aware of the leg touching the shoes, to be more creative!

As a final comment, Vipassana opens the doors of the mind to experiences we thought never existed in the mind :) Happy meditation!  

The Division of Perceptual Studies - University of Virginia

It is gratifying to know that scientists are moving away from the materialistic views (or at least trying to) that they have been holding onto for the last few centuries. Part of the belief in a materialistic world comes from the dogma surrounding religion. For many people, dogmatism and religion are two words describing the same concept. For instance, religion X proclaims, if you don't believe in Y, you will go to hell. That essentially is dogmatism in the name of religion and it is not worth naming those religions even for the sake of completeness. The Wordweb definition of the word religion are:

1) A strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny
2)An institution to express belief in a divine power

In light of the above definitions, Buddhism is not a religion because it doesn't have a fatalistic view or a creator God. Buddhism is a path of inquiry where faith is a result of verifying the teachings of the Buddha. There is a saying in Buddhist circles:


"Faith without wisdom will develop ignorance;
wisdom without faith will develop a perverted view."

In the previous article, we saw Quantum Physics "trash" Newtonian Mechanics when it comes to very very small elementary particles and the role of the observer in experiments. Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives." At one time consciousness was viewed with skepticism by many scientists, but in recent years it has become a significant topic of research in psychology and neuroscience.

The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), formerly the Division of Personality Studies , is a unit of the Department of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, VA. The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) was founded as a research unit of the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at UVA by Dr. Ian Stevenson in 1967. (see History and Description for more information about the founding of DOPS). Utilizing scientific methods, the researchers within The Division of Perceptual Studies investigate apparent paranormal phenomena, especially the idea of reincarnation common to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.

Watch a video of Dr. Jim Tucker describing a young boy who has memories of a previous life in which he was his own grandfather. In this video, Dr. Tucker discusses his own research as well as the research conducted by the esteemed founder of DOPS, the late Dr. Ian Stevenson. Click here to watch the video.

Listen to Dr. Jim Tucker describe some of the findings, including unusual play, behavior patterns, specific phobias, and birthmarks or birth defects specifically related to the life and death of a previous personality. He discusses the interpretation of the data and details about the methodology as well as possible pitfalls of individual cases. This interview was conducted by Dean Radin Ph.D. on December 8, 2010. This interview was done for the IONS Telseminars series. Dean Radin is well known for his best selling books The Conscious Universe (HarperOne, 1997) and Entangled Minds (Simon & Schuster, 2006). Dr. Radin is currently Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Sonoma State University.

A near-death experience, or NDE, is a common pattern of events that many persons experience when they are seriously ill or come close to death. Read an article from the UVA Alumni Magazine, summer 2007 ,focusing on the research into Near-Death Experiences being conducted by Dr. Bruce Greyson. This is one of the most profound talks on the sad-but-true materialistic view of modern scientists and the need to move away from the existing paradigm.

• This video is an excerpt of a  Nour Foundation panel discussion at the September 11, 2008 United Nations Symposium, "Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness," In this video, Dr. Bruce Greyson is discussing "Near Death Experiences-Beyond the Mind Body Problem". Click here to view the video.
• Here is another excerpt from the same  Nour Foundation panel discussion in 2008. In this portion of the video, Dr. Greyson is discussing the idea of consciousness beyond physical brain activity. Click here to view the video.

These are great, positive changes in the scientific community. I'm glad to come across scientists who are willing to challenge the existing beliefs without being overly aggressive about it. The impact of Dr. Ian Stevenson's research is hardly contained in a few adjectives of eulogy.

"Either he [Dr. Stevenson] is making a colossal mistake. Or he will be known as the Galileo of the 20th century." Dr Harold Lief in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 

Rebirth and Reality

For Buddhists and Hindus it's a given that rebirth exists, however, the modern world and physical science seems to conflict this belief that has survived for eons. The fact that it has survived deserves a closer look. What is rebirth? The Hindus say it's the say soul that migrates; Buddhists say it is the consciousness; Jains and Sikhs also maintain its a soul. Whatever becomes , let's put it aside and take up the common theme of rebirth.

Quantum physics is very different from the classical physics all of us are accustomed to. The classical version tells us when a ball hits a surface it rebounds, quantum physics tells us that the ball both rebounds and penetrates the wall because it is both a wave as well as a particle since matter is of dual nature! This dual nature was confirmed by the infamous Young's double slit experiment, see this video  Double Slit Experiment

If you had watched the video, you would know that the observer plays a crucial role, almost the very essence of the experiment. This baffled physicists and the only possible conclusion that they came up with was the existence of consciousness and we are not just the physical. Consciousness interacts with matter around it and continuously collapses the wave function to a single possibility that we experience. What is the wave function? The wave function are the infinite possibilities that is used to describe an event. An event could be as simple as throwing a ball or as complex as shooting an electron through two slits as in the double slit experiment. But why is it that we don't experience these quantum effects in daily life?

In quantum mechanics, answers also depend on the way the question is asked; i.e.,on the experiment performed. When physicists asked what light is made of, sometimes it answered that it was made up of particles, sometimes that it was made of waves. But while time-frequency decompositions are different perspectives on a signal that one knows, and that doesn't change, one can't have a perspective on the reality of quantum mechanics without changing that reality. Every time one measures the system, one changes it. So saying that light is made up of particles or of waves makes no sense. It's both at once, in flagrant contradiction with our experience and common sense. There is only one reality, the wave function; trying to understand it with a mentality molded by our deterministic world seems deemed to fail. We don't experience quantum effects in daily life because we are constantly interacting with reality and collapsing the wavefunction as part of our experience. The uncertainty in position and momentum are of the order of 6.632x10^-27 which is practically invisible to us and hence we don't experience quantum effects in daily life. (The world according to wavelets by Barbara Burke Hubbard)

So we have reached the conclusion that the mind is not necessarily an extension of the brain and it can interact with matter around it without having to stay inside the body, so to speak. In Vipassana, one can see that the mind which is rooted in anger, greed and delusion has no reason to stop after physical death.

The videos below show an interesting case of a three year old boy telling his parents about intricate details of airplanes used in the WWII and that he died in a plane crash.

A boy recounting his past life part 1
A boy recounting his past life part 2


Both the videos show that the kid remembered his past life because he died in a traumatic manner and the mind was unable to let go of that event. If this case felt like the parents wanting fame, let us look at something more scientific and formally presented.

Ian Pretyman Stevenson, MD was a Canadian biochemist and professor of psychiatry. Until his retirement in 2002, he was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, which investigates the paranormal. This is a lecture before his retirement presented to university colleagues. Before watching that lecture take a look at what other scientists had to say about Professor Ian Stevenson.

Robert Almeder, PhD on Stevenson

Professor Ian Stevenson case study presentation


Robert Almeder and other scientists believe that some people undergo rebirth, good thing they believe at least that. But ufff... it is true that everybody who is alive had past lives, even animals. The only reason for rebirth to take place is: ignorance. The Buddha explained it by dependent origination.


'Deep is this dependent origination, and deep its appearance. It's because of not understanding and not penetrating this Truth that this generation is like a tangled skein, a knotted ball of string, like matted rushes and reeds, and does not go beyond transmigration, beyond the planes of deprivation, woe, and bad destinations.'

For more on this important discourse by the Buddha : Dependent Origination


The mind is everything, what you think you become - the Buddha said. Doesn't remind you of something we went through in quantum mechanics, yes, the wave function being collapsed by us at each moment of our existence. The teachings of the Buddha are astoundingly scientific. The Buddha can show only the way, one must walk the path for himself to realize freedom from Samsara- the endless cycle of rebirth which entails birth, aging, death, sickness, pain, anguish, sorrow, lamentation and a huge amount of suffering that we go through. The way out of suffering, for those who are interested of course, is the way of mindfulness that leads to true happiness and freedom from suffering.

Way of mindfulness: How to Meditate (Vipassana)

Please feel free to comment or to ask any question.

Peace to all,

Bharath