Happy New Year: Buddhist becomes Jewish

Marc Bennett; Shalom Auslander; Rob Fashler; Sheldon S., Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

How the president of a Tibetan Buddhist temple became an Orthodox Jew

(Jewish Learning Institute) Sept. 13, 2022. Rob Fashler was raised in an atheist home where Judaism was anything but trendy. On the contrary, Judaism was ridiculed, particularly the Hasidic (extremely sexist orthodox) kind.

The Jew in the Lotus (Kamenetz)

The quest for spirituality and truth permeated his adolescent years, turning him to experiment with mind-expanding hippie drugs (e.g., LSD), sex-drugs-n-rock 'n roll, transcendental meditation (The Beatles' Hindu practice called TM), and eventually Tibetan Buddhism (Vajrayana).

From the president of a Buddhist temple to an Orthodox Jew, here is the journey of a man to whom the meaning and relevance of Judaism is nothing short of a miracle.

• "Refuge" in Buddhism really means "Going for Guidance" to the Three Gems or Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha)
• Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander (barnesandnoble.com)

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I was Jewish and became Buddhist.

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Another Jew supporting Boycott, Divestment, Sanctioning of Israel (Jewish Voice for Peace)

• Our favorite Jew: Shalom Auslander (NY Times)
• Was Jesus Christ a JuBu, a Jew who became a Buddhist?
• Sunday Meditation: Shambhala Meditation Center of LA

Nepal Army's meditation weapon

Col. (Ret.) Jitendra Jung Karki and Dr. David R. Leffler (collective-evolution.com, asiasentinel.com, April Fools Day); Pfc. Sandoval, Dhr. Seven, Ellie Askew, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Meditation "best proactive approach to preventing terrorism" (Leffter, et. al., April 1, 2019)

Wow, I'm gonna apply to join Nepal's Army boarding school to be a super TM soldier!

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Nepal’s army schools are finishing their first stage of implementation of a meditative Invincible Defense Technology (IDT).

The ultimate goal of IDT is to prevent enemies from arising by reducing the collective societal stress that culminates in war, terrorism, and crime.

IDT involves the use of Transcedental Meditation (TM) techniques and advanced practices, ideally by the military, to reduce collective societal stress.

I am now a great warrior of peace.

Extensive peer-reviewed research has documented the efficacy of this approach (David Leffler, 1999). Militaries and police departments worldwide have successfully field-tested and are now using this approach. (See Review Nepal, Aug. 10, 2016 “IDT: A Powerful, Proven, Tool for Police and Military”).

The army school in Bhaktapur, Nepal was the first military school to implement TM. Now 300 of its teaching staff and 2,700 students have greatly benefited from practicing TM, according to TM teacher Ms. Pappy Regmi.

Regmi says, “TM has been practiced by the students of Sainik Awasiya Mahavidyalaya Sallaghari (SAMV), Bhaktapur for the past three years.

“After the [military boarding school] students mastered the simple, natural, and easy-to-learn TM procedure, we noticed many positive changes in them. They are less irritable, aggressive, and destructive in nature than before.

“Many students improved their academic performance. This non-religious, scientifically-validated technique is helping the students in their overall development.” More

Gov'ts love public wars for private profits

When peace is the purpose of the military then we win. Peace is not the purpose. War is.

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Dr. Leffler (istpp)

Former Home Minister Deepak Prakash Baskota was one of the first Nepalese leaders to advocate the military use of IDT.

In an article titled “How Nepal Can Have An ‘Invincible’ Military” published in Eurasia Review (2012) Home Minister Baskota wrote:

War is a Racket (Gen. Butler)

“Leaders in Nepal could make their mark if they adopt this most ideal defense system. The implementation of IDT would mark a turning point in the history of Nepal’s national defense, and the leaders in Nepal would also be leading the world into perpetual peace.”

• Col. (Ret.) Karki was liaison officer at SAMV Army Residential High School of Nepal. Dr. David Leffler, Ph.D. (istpp.org) is the executive director at the Center for Advanced Military Science (CAMS).

"Murder, Mayhem, and MEDITATION" (video)

Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; VICE News; DLFTV; Dhamma Brothers

How are we supposed to meditate if the guards keep making that noise to F with us?

What life is really like for women in the growing prison-industrial complex (Daily Mail)

Breathe in, breathe out. Not having been, they come to be; once having been, they cease. When this is, that arises. When that is not, that does not arise. Damn biased, bogus judge...

The United States of America is locking up more people than any other nation on earth. Home to just 5 percent of the world's total population, the USA houses more than 20 percent of the world's prisoners.

In the last three decades -- fueled in large part by a bogus national drug policy (aimed at mass incarceration to drive up drug prices for the benefit of bankers and militarized police at the expense of taxpayers) as well as legislation that backfires like Three Strikes laws -- the U.S. has imprisoned even more citizens.

There are now more people in prisons, local jails, federal penitentiaries, and private "correctional" facilities than Stalin put in Russian gulags.

New court rulings have declared overcrowded prisons to be unconstitutional, and the sheer cost of incarceration is forcing prisons to let prisoners back out on the streets.

VICE News was granted rare access to go inside one of the most maximum-security prisons in the country, a place that's on the frontline of what could be a sea change in prison policy.

(DLF.tv/dlfprojects.org) A meditation-based rehabilitation program offered by the David Lynch Foundation has been utilized in dozens of prisons throughout the US and worldwide over the past 30 years. Research on meditating inmates at San Quentin and Folsom prisons in California and Walpole Prison in Massachusetts has found transcendental meditation (TM) practice markedly reduces rule infractions and dramatically reduces recidivism rates by as much as 50 percent. This 5-minute documentary shows how the effects of TM are transforming the lives of inmates, guards, and staff of a medium-security prison in Oregon.

Salinas Valley State Prison is home to America's most powerful prison gangs including the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia. It's a place that's projected to have more than 700 sexual and/or assaults this year.

In an institution that houses the alleged "worst of the worst," we see how one maverick warden is trying to turn the system around by rehabilitating murderers before they get returned to the streets.

• VICE News: vicenews.com, facebook.com/vicenews, twitter.com/vicenews, vicenews.tumblr.com

The Punishment Problem

America's 10 Worst Prisons: Julia Tutwiler (Mother Jones)

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Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year -- men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo [Guantanamo Bay] and Abu Ghraib [US torture prison] a run for their money. More

"Punishment" does not reform anyone, nor does warehousing. According to the report of the Reentry Policy Council "Charting the Safe and Successful Return of Prisoners to the Community," two million Americans are serving time in our prison-industrial complex; 50% of the inmates are in for violent crimes; about 67% of the inmates released from prison are re-arrested within three years; this recidivism rate has not improved over the past 30 years; prisoners return to society more hardened and more willing to commit crimes than before. What is the David Lynch Foundation (DLF) doing about it? See the 5-minute video above.

Insight on the Inside

And I thought doing ten days at a Goenka retreat was impossible, this BS never ends!

As we do to "enemies," we do to our citizens.

(AC) "The Dhamma Brothers" is a 2007 documentary about a prison meditation program at Donaldson Correctional Facility near Bessemer, Alabama. It follows four inmates, all convicted of murder, and includes interviews with guards, prison officials, local residents, and other inmates with reenactments of their crimes.

Meditation Behind Bars

Directed by Jenny Phillips, a cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist, Andrew Kukura, a documentary filmmaker, and Anne Marie Stein, a film-school administrator. In 2008 Phillips released Letters from the Dhamma Brothers: Meditation Behind Bars, a book based on follow-up letters with the inmates. "The Dhamma Brothers" has been compared with another documentary, "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana" (1997), which documented a large scale meditation program at Tihar Prisons in India with over a thousand inmates using the same meditation retreat format (Goenka-style).

The Meditation Program

When I'm standing behind bars instead of in front of them, then I'll meditate. (Disgraced L.A. Sheriff Lee Baca indicted on serious felonies faces 20 years of payback in prison).

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Stripes, fashion statement or social statement?

Director Jenny Phillips was largely responsible for the insight meditation movement program's inception at the prison. Phillips had previously studied prison culture in Massachusetts.

In 1999, she heard that prisoners at Donaldson were practicing meditation and she then organized the first ten-day intensive Goenka retreat there in January 2002. Phillips believes that was the first time a ten-day retreat had been held in a United States maximum-security prison such as Donaldson. Previous US courses had been in county jails.

• Female prisoner quotes (quotesgram.com)

College students who meditate are better off

Times of India (July 17, 2009)

Students who meditate are better off when it comes to dealing with stress in college, according to new research at American U.

The study pointed out that such students also remain less fatigued and have more "integrated" brains. According to the researchers, Transcendental Meditation (TM) may be an effective non-medicinal tool for students to buffer themselves against the intense stresses of college life.

"The pressures of college can be overwhelming: 44% of college students binge drink, 37% report use of illegal drugs, 19% report clinical depression, and 13% report high levels of anxiety," said the lead author and director of the MUM brain research center.

Titled "Effects of Transcendental Meditation practice on brain functioning and stress reactivity in college students," the research is the first random assignment study of the effects of meditation practice on brain and physiological functioning in college students. For the study, the researchers roped in 50 students from American University and other Washington, D.C. area universities.

They then probed the effects of ten weeks of TM practice on "Brain Integration Scale" scores (broadband frontal coherence, power ratios, and preparatory brain responses), electrodermal habituation to a stressful stimulus, and sleepiness in the participants.

At pre-test, the researchers measured the physiological and psychological variables and then the students were randomly assigned to a TM or control group. Post-test was ten weeks later -- just before final exam week.

At post-test, the meditating students had higher Brain Integration Scale scores, less sleepiness, and faster habituation to a loud tone: They were less jumpy and irritable. "The pressures of college can be overwhelming.

• 44 percent of college students binge drink
• 37 percent report use of illegal drugs
• 19% report clinical depression
• 13 percent report high levels of anxiety,"

said Fred Travis, lead author and director of the MUM brain research center.

He said that the data from the non-meditating control group showed the detrimental effects of college life on the students. "The control group had lower Brain Integration Scale scores, indicating their brain functioning was more fragmented -- which can lead to more scattered and disorganized thinking and planning. The controls also showed an increase in sympathetic reactivity and sleepiness, which can correspond to greater anxiety, worry, and irritability" he said.

On the other hand, TM practice appeared to buffer the effects of high stress. Travis said: "From pre-test to post-test, Brain Integration Scale scores increased significantly, indicating greater breadth of planning, thinking, and perception of the environment.

The sympathetic reactivity and sleepiness decreased among the TM group, which corresponds to greater emotional balance and wakefulness. "These statistically significant results among college students suggest that the practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique could be of substantial value for anyone facing an intense and challenging learning/working environment."

The study was published in a recent issue of the peer-reviewed International Journal of Psychophysiology. Source