Magic Mural Meditation (Ekaterina Sky)

We're filming a video in front of the mural, Sunday, 5:30-8:00 pm. Wear white shirt to participate in the filming of a music video for local artist Honore's song "Haven"

This is the actual Altadena Mural we created, but it's horizontal on site.

Impact Artist Ekaterina Sky

Up the mountain that is Lake Avenue in Pasadena into Altadena (north of Colorado Blvd. and over the 134/210 Freeway junction) is a magical mural. We painted it under the visionary direction of Impact Artist Ekaterina Sky (Instagram).

It has a secret purpose. It is a giant golden disc (kasina) surrounded by shooting beams of red, white, and maroon lines that produce a pulsating, stroboscopic effect. One takes a meditative seat in front of it on a yoga mat or towel, under the shade tree of what remains of Oh Happy Days Vegan Cafe and the city's main post office parking lot.

• DIRECTIONS: Travel north on Lake Ave. just past the Grocery Outlet. Turn left on Mendocino St. Turn left down first driveway after Jack in the Box. The mural is on the right behind the former site of the post office.

Don't "try" to try; just do it. It's as easy as that.

Using the brilliant gold disc as a Buddhist kasina (disc) or Vedic Hindu mandala (or yantra-chakra), the lines producing a sensation of entering the disc, blurring then erasing the line between subject and object. It is a kind of nondual (advaita) experience of "oneness" in the sense of a Beholder blending with the Beheld.

Can't "concentrate" (unify the mind, gather the faculties to stay on one thing)? Use binaural beats with headphones while softly viewing the disc and doing nothing else.

I hear Chicago's "Colour My World" when I start to sit

Does the world suck, Winston?

In the West we say, "Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder." And so it is. Or at least it can be. Surely, when we feel happy, the whole world seems sunny and sweet. When we're afraid, it may seem cold and grey, dingy like the world did to Winston Smith in George Orwell's dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four. Is the world this way or that?

Who knows! It might be a utopia. We never see it objectively; we are always looking at it subjectively. So removing the difference between the two and becoming ONE with it, even for a moment, is very instructive for how the world and our experience of it has really been working.

HEMI SYNC FLOW STATE THETA 4HZ BINAURAL BEATS

The secret to meditative absorption, what the Buddha called jhana (Sanskrit dhyana), which literally translates as "meditation," is happiness. There is no "way to happiness," some wit once said. Why? It is because happiness is the way! Happiness and singlepointed attention on certain objects leads to piti, a blissful welling up of joy from within. It isn't that the world has changed and given us permission to be happy. It is that our cultivated happiness has all of a sudden bloomed and blossomed, sprouted and shot up. It is a kind of rapture, or better to say an effortless effervescence.

If stared at long enough, with a soft focus not tightness, it moves on its own.

Artist a work play.

Recently someone on Wisdom Quarterly called it a very pleasant "body buzz" (Michael Taft). The whole body tingles and seems to levitate or at least become very light when we take ourselves lightly. It IS possible to feel that floaty feeling when we no longer take things so seriously and instead just let them be. That's what McCarthy said to do in that Beatles' song. "Mother Mary [Magdelene] comes to me, speaking words of wisdom: 'Let it be.'"

• I can't "do" it! No, you can't. But it (jhana) can happen when we set up the circumstances for it to arise by itself, like gardening. No one can garden, that is, no one can make a plant grow. But anyone can set up the circumstances for a seed to sprout and a plant to come into being. Bhavana, often translated as "meditation," means "cultivation" and literally "bringing into being." Leigh Brasington tells Dan Harris it's deceptively simple. Stop "doing." Just attend to the object.
• Samadhi is a super-conscious, coherent unification of mind accompanied by profound attention and stillness.

What is the Prayer for the Earth?

However things are, that's okay. Let 'em be. They have to be just as they are because we are allowing not opposing, accepting not fighting, seeing clearly rather than distorting or trying to make them some other way. The Buddha's Path to Freedom, the path to mental purification, starts with this level of absorption that is employed in "clear-seeing" (vipassana). There isn't one or the other; there's both. There is no pyramid peak without a solid foundation.

Oh, I see it now, at my third eye.

Absorption (blissful sustained attention) is that base. The peak is insight, clearly seeing. Vayānupassanā means "contemplation of vanishing" and is one of the 18 chief kinds of insight (vipassāna). So whatever we can do to still the mind and turn it into a laser beam of attention rather than the scattered, weak, diffused, dingy, and easily distracted fluorescence of our dull glow is a good thing to be doing -- Ashtanga (Eight Limbs of Yoga) and the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path.

(Why do they call it "noble"? The word is Aryan, and it literally means "Enlightening," so we should call it the Ennobling Eightfold Path, the practice of which brings us to bodhi and nirvana, awakening and the ultimate truth).

Altered States (trailer)

(Sierra Fotuhi) Who would ever make a song about little ol' Altadena?

We are going to return soon to film a music video with the mural. Then we are going to move it. It's portable. So this free meditation is a limited-time offer. At the next stop it will have its QR code to listen to the prayers embedded behind the gold. Do you know what alta means in Spanish? "High." Not because it's above Pasadena, but because it's a place for a natural altered state.

• (Sleeping on Trees) We create our reality without knowing it
• Dhr. Seven and Ekaterina Sky, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly; Sri Yantra (Pin de Jen Browne |  Arte de la geometría sagrada, Arte fractal)

Practical Guide to Deep Meditative States

(Dhamma Centre) How to strengthen concentration through jhāna with Shaila Catherine

How to strengthen concentration through jhāna with Shaila Catherine

(Dhamma Centre) Streamed live in 2021. This online event includes a Dhamma talk, a brief guided meditation, and a Question & Answer session. Ask questions about the practice of concentration, and Shaila will respond with an understanding gleaned from her extensive experience with jhana practice. Join to explore the role of concentration in Dhamma practice.

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  The Buddha in samadhi at Gal Vihara, Sri Lanka

  "Concentration"? What does samadhi really mean? The Pali texts describe this quality of mind as "internally steadied, composed and settled, unified." It is a coherent mind, a unification of the mind with the object, a stillness of mind free of distraction, undistractedness, collectedness, and focused attention that produces a profound stability of mind. It is the factor that lands on the meditation object, penetrates it, and stays there. We stay attentive with the object, not dispersed, dissipated, scattered, or agitated. We experience it with cohesion and coherence, internal strength, often very pleasant (states linked to bliss, happiness, equanimity, a joy born of seclusion or withdrawal of the senses) associated with tranquility, calm, ease, peacefulness, stillness, rapture, bliss, deep and profound equanimity. Fixed focus (appana samadhi) is a single focus on any one of a variety of different objects. There is another called momentary concentration (kannica samadhi).

The Jhanas: A Practical Guide to Deep Meditative States

The Jhanas: A Practical Guide

Author Shaila Catherine has 4.8 out of 5 stars with 27 ratings for this instructional manual. It promises to give access to some wonderful things:

Experience new levels of joy, calm, and clarity with this revised and enhanced edition of the bestselling Focused and Fearless.

The Pali word jhana (Sanskrit dhyana) literally means “to meditate.” It also refers to a traditional series of states of meditative absorption, each deeper than the last, in which the mind is undistracted by sensation, thoughts, or moods.

• Shaila Catherine—founder and principal teacher – Insight Meditation South Bay

Shaila Catherine’s friendly, wise approach, blended with contemporary examples and pragmatic "how to" instructions that anyone can try, shows meditators (and non-meditators) how to attain these extraordinary states with relative ease.

But jhana practice is about much more than just meditation or concentration [the misleading word most often used to translate samadhi]; it offers a complete path toward bliss, fearlessness, and true awakening.

• Dharma Seed - Shaila Catherine's Dharma Talks

From the introduction:

It's so natural, laypeople can reach it with ease.

Jhanas are states of happiness that can radically transform the heart, reshape the mind, imbue consciousness with enduring joy and ease, and provide an inner resource of tranquility that surpasses any conceivable sensory pleasure.

Jhanas are states of deep rest, healing rejuvenation, and profound comfort that create a stable platform for transformative insight.

Beyond Distraction: Five Ways

In this approach to jhana, we use the calming aspects of concentration to support the investigative aspects of insight meditation. The fruit of concentration is freedom of heart and mind.

This new edition of the meditation classic clarifies crucial points and offers twenty-one additional exercises, making this a great book for both those new to jhana practice and those looking to deepen their practice. The Jhanas: A Practical Guide to Deep Meditative States

• Buddhist Meditation Teacher Shaila Catherine
• Shaila Catherine (Amazon.com)
• AllYouCanBooks.com
• Shaila Catherine, Bhante, Dhamma Centre, March 6, 2021 (Dharma talk); Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Science: 'Flow state' when 'in the zone'

There are prepared raps, and there are on-the-fly, by-the-seat-of-your-pants raps in a flow state

There are rumored to be whites who overcome their stiff awkwardness and get with the flow

White men can't jump, but some may be able to kickstart Broca's area in the brain and GO.

"Nice job." This white man can hump jump...on anyone in front of him because he loves pizza.

Can culture foster flow states as a common expectation of the natural range of human ability?

What would hip hop and rap have been without the magic of dropping into flow?

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Irishmen can rap, at least in Gaelic and on drugs.

Life is better when everything flows and "goes swimmingly." What is that magic, ease, and effortlessness? It seems to be the spontaneous way of being Zen is constantly harping about and elevating to spiritual status.

When we are calm and confident (full of relaxation and faith), we tend to be able to speak without hesitating or halting, stammering or stuttering, thinking or pausing.

It is pleasant for all, full of ease, and joyful for the natural actor who is simply living, simply being rather than doing. All life can be like that, unpremeditated, artless, authentic?

The "zone," the "zone," where is the zone? Twilight Zone? Drugged state? Zen and [the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"] the art of relaxation?

Where's science when we really need it? Tell us how to get it! Breakthrough alert:

Flow state uncovered: We finally know what happens in the brain when we're "in the zone"

Meditative absorption flows with ease

Many of us know the feeling of being "in the zone" as we're fully immersed in a task [absorbed = jhana = Zen], the background noise of the world fades and we may not notice time passing or things going on around us. [It is sweet relief, producing piti].

Gymnasts may enter this all-consuming mental state as they're refining a floor routine, an artist might find "the zone" when adding delicate brushstrokes to a painting, and writers might enter it as they're crafting the climax of a chapter.

• ALERT: Study pinpoints origins of CREATIVITY in the brain
• This is our brain on magic mushrooms (psilocybin)
• What happens in our brains when we 'hear' our own thoughts?
• 12 things you don't realize you do because you have high functioning anxiety
• Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) Buddhist sati meditation can help brain even a year later (PsyPost.org)
• Psychology reveals the remarkable impact of meditation on basic cognitive mechanisms during learning (PsyPost)
• Human consciousness evolved as a means of social survival, scientists say

Oh, I can stop yelling and criticizing and just be.

This state, known in psychology as a "flow state," is pursued by those who want to be more productive and creative in an enjoyable way.

What happens in the brain during this state, however, has been under debate for more than four decades. Now, in research published March 4th in the journal Neuropsychologia, scientists may have settled the debate.

Life can be full of bliss and ease (piti and sukha).

They conducted a new brain-scan study that has finally revealed which regions of the brain are activated in the midst of a creative flow state.

Their findings contradict one popular theory of flow while supporting another, and they seem to reveal the key ingredients needed to get "in the zone.":

• 'Flow state' uncovered: We finally know what happens in the brain when we're 'in the zone'
• Jennifer Zieba, LiveScience.com via MSN.com, March, 2024; Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Chicken Brain/Monkey Mind: Meditation

Don't choke your man-chicken all week and expect it to calm down when you sit for meditation.

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I can't get this man-chicken to shut the h*ll up!

Oh, it's you. (Gary Larson)

The Buddha taught two general types of "meditation" (bhavana, "cultivation"), calm (shamatha stillness = samadhi) and insight (vipassana, "clear seeing"). It all begins with calm and relaxation. It is essential for entering a meditative state. This is greatly aided by letting go and allowing the meditation to occur naturally. We are not "doing" it; it is just happening. What we do do is set up the conditions, the ingredients, the circumstances for calm to happen.

• 10 funniest Far Side comics that prove Gary Larson is obsessed with chickens (ScreenRant/MSN)

Discursive (monkey) thinking in average American

Pick a quiet and undistracted location, time, and come to it in silence (because outward silence gives way to inner silence), well rested with the determination to sit for such and such a length of time, say 20 minutes or an hour. The habit or "ritual" of doing it cues the mind to get into that peaceful state.

Quick and easy techniques to calm anxious mind

It is very refreshing. With the mind trained to enter this lightly hypnagogic state of deep relaxation, things can go very deep in a relatively short time. Otherwise, we risk taking to the mat for years, only noticing progress after a while. Of course, progress is made from meditating even once, but it is not likely to be noticeable until we sit on a somewhat regular basis and have our waking life mirror our inner calm.

Big set up. The punchline is lying behind the cowboy's hindquarters.

Look away, Monk, or you'll get no peace!

What happens in a sitting meditation is very much affected by what we do for the other 23 or more hours of the day. By way of comparison, imagine owning a chicken. And once a day (alone) or once a week (in a group), we sit to meditate for an hour. What is the likelihood that that chicken is going to stay calm and quiet for an hour and not bother anyone? Next to none. But it all depends.

If anyone thinks a chicken is going to calm down because we tell it, "Calm down and shut up!" or attempt to beat, strangle, and chase it around the room, try to grab it by the neck and wrestle it to the mat, we must not know very many chickens.

They are nervous, inquisitive, territorial, bothersome, easily disturbed nuts. And once riled, it is almost impossible to get them to calm down again.

Training our chickens (minds) to fly effortlessly is meditation.

But if we pet it lovingly, soothe it, look on it with kind eyes, bring it back to sitting still again and again, without getting angry or frustrated with it, it might calm down for a minute, and not much more than that.

But if we choke our chicken, yell at it, threaten it, grab it by the feathers and try to force it down, scream at it to shut the h*ll up, that will never work. It will only reflect what we are intending at it.

Now we may say, we don't have a chicken and we never will. But we do, and we always have. Only we call it a mind. That mind is much more sensitive than a chicken, much more reactive to our attitude towards it, much harder to settle and keep calm even for a minute. We can fake it until we make it, but "monkey mind" may drive us so crazy that we can't even fake it.

Then what are we doing? Berating it, treating it the way we were raised -- or at least all the bad ways in which we were raised: yelling, anger, punishment, threats, condemnation, criticism, dismissal, non-support. Whew, what a number our parents or caretakers did on us.

What were you expecting, Doctor, a chicken? - No, my Little Ducky, no.

If only a detective were on hand to make sense of the clues.

We have actually always been taught that one way to remain calm in the midst of the "slings and arrows" life hurls at us -- being hit with unpleasant words, sights, sounds, circumstances, or threats, or attitudes and shades and the sense that we are not liked or, worse yet, physical abuse -- is to slowly count to ten.

Well, what's the use of that if we have not in advance linked that counting to a calmer state.

I like life much better now that I'm not afraid you'll yell at me for anything wrong I might d.

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What comes first, calm or a calm-chicken?

But the Silva Method of Mind Valley's Vivek, we can accustom our minds to associate that calm counting with an objective measure of calm, a more soothing brainwave state. Try it. And at all times everywhere for the whole week between group sits (but particularly at every solo sit), be nice to your chicken. Treat it as you would want to be treated in the best of circumstances.

If only we had a nice closing line to wrap it all up in a memorable way. "A happy wife, a happy life" or, in this case, "a foul fowl is a living howl," where "howl" means hell. "A happy hubby, a stubby chubby"? No, that one doesn't work. Got it! "A happy spouse, a peaceful house"! Yes, that's an original!

• It's a technicality, but things arise together. Paticca samuppada (Dependent Origination, Conditioned Co-Genesis, Conditionality) means things co-arise simultaneously. See Bhikkhu Bodhi, As It Is (tape series),
• Gary Larson (The Far Side); This is Part II by Meditation Instructor Seven, as told to Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Jen Bradford, Moon, Wisdom Quarterly, from a Mind Valley commercial by Vivek Lakhani based on an idea, insight, and teaching by Jose Silva, author of Silva Mind Control.

Write it: Seven Step Massage Meditation

Dhr. Seven, Jen Bradford, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly

The deepest relaxation, writing or massage?

My teacher, Seven, taught me to meditate then told me to write about the experience for the benefit of others. I'd rather talk or stay quiet. I can't write. Can I write? Seven says if a person can talk, that person can write. They're almost the same...but not quite, not by a longshot sometimes.

• WRITE? 18 Things People Who Love Writing Understand (guide2free.com)

Yoga and good posture help body relax and get still.

Seven once came up with the ideal "American meditation," sinking into a warm bath to relax. Suds, scents, a candle in the dark or soft accent lights, all converge to bring about stillness. Until the water gets cold.

Stillness, samadhi, is the initial goal. Without a tub it's tough. So I used a sauna, steam room, and a hot tub (jacuzzi), but in public, with the jets, the excess heat, and cringey chlorine, nah. The warmth is relaxing. All the rest is not.

Asked where I do relax, I could only think of our massage table or chair in the quiet room. At Reiki shares, I might even fall asleep under warm hands and mysterious energy, prana or solar chi, unless I mindfully come back and back.

Pup knows I'm more relaxed than ever

Coming back and back, like Sharon Salzberg says, is part of a mindfulness practice. Seven says mindfulness (sati) is necessary for samadhi ("stillness" not "concentration"). And stillness is needed for the sort of systematic fourfold mindfulness necessary for insight meditation (vipassana).

That's the next goal, if there are goals: INSIGHT. Wisdom is the cause of liberation, because wisdom is "direct penetration into the reality all around." Sayalay Aloka said her teacher pointed out that the "Truth" is actually everywhere all around all the time. We don't "see" (know) it.

Think about it. The Three Characteristics of Existence are that all dhammas, all "things," are impermanent, imperfect (dukkha), and impersonal.

1. They're hurtling toward destruction.
2. They disappoint and can never fulfill.
3. They aren't what they seem to be (not themselves) but rather are empty (not-self).

Dharma Buddha Meditation @Reiki Share in HB

Those are the insights reached by vipassana, when it's at the level of knowing-and-seeing ULTIMATE materiality and mentality (kalapas and cittas, particles and mind-moments). Otherwise, it's just intellectualizing and won't liberate the mind/heart. That's next. First, relax.

Calm meditation is the beginning of the Path. That and questioning because the Buddha has answers. (The answer to there not being a self is that -- we have to ask -- "Well, what is there then? What's THIS!?"

Are these two "meditating" or just kicking around in the dirt loving plants?

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Organic vegan gardening and farming can help.

The Buddha answers. It's Dependent Origination, that is, the thing we see (the Five Aggregates clung to as self) is dependently originated, conditioned, arising when the constituent factors (causes and conditions) are present and not when they are not.

"When this is, that comes to be. With the arising of this, this arises. When this is not, that does not come to be. With the perishing of this, that perishes," the Buddha taught as a sort of summary of the causal links of paticcasamuppada or Dependent Origination.

"Massage Meditation" in seven steps

1. Pick a trusted practitioner you're comfortable with.
2. Be sure to be well-rested with enough sleep (or you'll just fall asleep during this).
3. With lights down and a light touch, advert (turn) attention to the breath.
4. The massage, with a good oil like virgin coconut butter or real olive oil, depending on skin, avoiding anything synthetic, using instead hexane-free essential oils.
5. This works much better with a masseuse or masseur who meditates because the initial phase is calming and firm or so light as to energetically relax the physical body so that the mental body relaxes.
6. Then firm warm hands hold in one place as the mind is brought back again and again until it rests on the breath as it's known under the nose.
7. The massage stops with the body almost in sleep-paralysis, but mind fully awake, full stillness, so that the subtlest breath is now the focus, sustaining it until a nimitta appears.

The body comes out of it not needing to rest, as in sitting full or half lotus, but calm, refreshed, and ready to mindfully engage in daily activities. The mind may want to rest, and now the body is very supple for that.