This Class Not About Meditation - It is Meditation

Audio recording of meditation talk at University of California, Berkeley. Meditation is not separate from any aspect of life. All of life is infused with the potential of intense presence-at-hand.

This Class Not About Meditation - It is Meditation by americ

Desire Behind All Desire

It's not so important how long you live; but that you realize who you really are before you pass away. In that self-realization is the true goal of life consciousness. The desire behind all desire.

HBO's 'Enlightened' Take On Modern Meditation

This afternoon (1:27 pm, October 10th), I'm listening to the Terry Gross interview of Laura Dern and Mike White on NPR's "Fresh Air". Suddenly, my mind is twisted with the story of a new HBO television show about meditation and enlightenment. The series starts tonight. You will be enlightened!

To hear the interview or read parts of the transcript visit THIS LINK.  

From the program description:

Can people really change? That's the question Laura Dern and Mike White ask in their new HBO series, Enlightened, which premieres Monday night. The show features Dern as Amy Jellicoe, an ambitious executive who has a nervous breakdown at her workplace. She goes to a rehabilitation center in Hawaii, where she experiences an awakening.

When Amy returns home, she wants to put her new philosophy into practice — meditating, communicating better with her mother (Diane Ladd), and fostering a healthier relationship with her ex-husband (Luke Wilson). But she finds her lessons of enlightenment being put to the test.

Show creator Mike White wrote the series and also directed some of the episodes. White and Dern join Fresh Air's Terry Gross for a conversation about Enlightened.

Occupy Wall Street Becoming a Mainstream Dialogue

I've been watching the fast growing "Occupy Wall Street" movement on Twitter and in the mainstream media online. Today (Sunday, October 9th), it emerges as a major news story on CBS's online website. The cat is out of the bag - the "money, wealth, and power" discourse is up for renewal. I'm hoping it's a return to reality and away from ideology. This will take a massive amount of dialogue in all directions; between many kinds of people.

Occupy Wall Street is now a "normative dialogue" (a dialogue about the kinds of society we value) between people on the streets, people at home watching/reading the news, and talking with friends at coffee houses, local markets, workplaces, etc. There are also the measured responses of those with "control" on all sides of the political spectrum. We are facing a profound social-political-economic mystery. All I hope for now is that we all stay nonviolent and be open to deepening dialogue and understanding - open minds, suspending all judgments. Let truth guide us.

Outremer by Fanny Howe

I recently "discovered" a new poet in my life, Fanny Howe while reading Poetry Magazine's September 2011 issue - which published Howe's long prose-like poem, Outremer. Upon reading it three times, I was hooked. Here's video reading of Outremer (a collaboration by Fanny Howe and artist Maceno Senna):


Outremer from Fanny Howe on Vimeo.

"Greed is Good" - Wall Street & Beyond

Years ago I saw the classic 1989 movie: Wall Street. A story of a corporate takeover artist. He took over one company at a time. Small stuff compared the financial engineering that brought down the world's financial system in 2008, followed by global economic depression.

Is greed the real engine of human progress? Given all the current events around the "Occupy Wall Street" protests, let's revisit the "greed is good" speech by the movie's main protagonist: Gorden Gekko (played in 1987 by Michael Douglas). Here are his words in court:



By the way, Gekko did not use the the words "Greed is Good" in the original Wall Street film. Here's a transcript: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A."

Nicholas Ashford, MIT Economist re: Occupy Wall Street

The "Occupy Wall Street" protests in New York are growing into a global event. This phenomena questions basic assumptions about money, value, society, and environment. This second week of September 2011, see many main stream news stories emerging. The following extracted from http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/1004/Occupy-Wall-Street-flash-in-the-pan-or-beginning-of-a-movement.

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Americans should be prepared to see this movement take hold and spread, says MIT economics professor and lawyer Nicholas Ashford, author of “Technology, Globalization, and Sustainable Development – Transforming the Industrial State: Exploring the Critical Conflicts between Economy, Environment, and Employment.”
It’s not just a matter of people being “mad as hell and not taking it anymore,” he says. “It’s more crucially the dawning realization that the US economy was always built on quicksand, and that our current dismal state is not the anomaly, but the reality.”
“Instead of waiting for the economy to ‘bounce back’ to a previous state of health that was nothing but a sad illusion,” says Professor Ashford, “Washington, Wall Street, and big business need to address a strategy for moving forward from where we are,” not from where they thought we were.

Meditation & the Practice of Law

The Practical Value of Meditation in Law Practice. Talk, guided meditation, and question/answers. Delivered by Charles Halpern, Director, Berkeley Initiative for Mindfulness in Law. (Bolt Law School, University of California, Berkeley). Presented to the 300 students of Americ Azevedo's "Theory and Practice of Meditation" course at UC Berkeley. September 28th, 2011.
Listen/Download   Long quiet guided meditation moments deleted from this audio file.