Sean Oakes

Politics is Distracting

It’s 4am on election day, and though I can’t see it through the rain clouds, there’s a full lunar eclipse out there. It’s really tempting to make the image of an orange moon before dawn, cast into colored shadow by a quirk of orbital geometry, into an ill omen. Maybe it is. People have been interpreting eclipses as cosmic commentary […]

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“Emotion” and the Path

The way we use the word “emotion” in modern English refers to a whole range of cognitive-affective-somatic experiences like love, anger, hatred, joy, grief, compassion, jealousy, delight, longing, etc. In the Pāli texts, there’s no single word covering all these things, and that’s true for many other world cultures. English makes a primary distinction between “heart” experiences like these and

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Thinking is Doing / Fractals of Effort

We’ve been talking about both additive and subtractive aspects of meditation—cultivating wholesome states and diminishing unwholesome. This is the framework from “right effort” in the Eightfold Path. But if we take even a simple interpretation of this instruction to mean that we should work on cultivating the awakening factors and work on diminishing the hindrances, that’s still a complicated internal

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Don’t Confuse Path for Goal

Ok, last week’s talk and the post that accompanied it got a lot of response. Almost all the responses were variations of pushback on the idea that we should be active, even fierce, in working to diminish our hindrances. Why is this very traditional idea controversial? I have ideas, but admit that I was a bit surprised. It’s always interesting

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Don’t “Accept” Hindrances

The five “hindrances” (nīvaraṇā) are the pathologies of our practice. They are those forces in the heart that obstruct clear seeing and insight, and prevent meditative focus and immersion. They are the addictive mind, the demons of ADHD, the source of all our neurotic habits. They are symptoms of trauma, and deeper, of the fundamental ignorance that is the heart

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Uprightness as Somatic Metaphor

In contemporary Insight Meditation, we often include the expanded postural guideline that lying down is a fine meditation posture if sitting isn’t available for your body. This is a good instruction, and I think it’s really skillful to include laying down in one’s vocabulary of postures, including for formal meditation. Accessibility is a prerequisite for practice. That said, I want

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Beautiful Buddhist Anarchy

Finishing for now our discussion of civic life, social engagement, and wise governance, I suggest that the most coherent political philosophy from a Dharma perspective is anarchy. This is because of how fully Buddhist thinkers have recognized that violence is implicit in governance, whether those in authority inherit, seize, or are elected into power. In a short discourse in the

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All Skillful Action is Impersonal

One way we can think about ethics and action in the Buddha’s teachings is to consider grasping as the foundation of personal identity. This is the heart of dependent origination, where the contraction of grasping and clinging leads directly to the solidification of personal identity, or “becoming.” When the desires and needs of oneself as an individual are in the

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Pacifism is Complicated

The Buddha was clearly a pacifist, under any modern definition of the term. The most fundamental ethical precept is not to take life. One story has him trying to stop a war against his homeland by sitting in meditation under the blazing sun right in the path of the invading army. When the aggressor, the neighboring king, asks him why

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