Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer

My Own Life

Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer

A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.

Hume continued, “I am ... a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”

Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

Read more here - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/opinion/oliver-sacks-on-learning-he-has-terminal-cancer.html

Awakening the Buddha

Original Source - Awakening the Buddha - Lama Surya Das

Mindful Environmentalism

What we seek, we are. We are all Buddhas by nature, temporarily obscured by adventitious emotions and illusions. We only have to awaken to that fact.  All that we seek is available within. And not just within ourselves but within each other, each relationship, and encounter, each moment. Let’s exploit our own innate natural resources for a change, and give our exterior resources a rest. This would truly be Mindful Environmentalism and planetary stewardship. This world is my body, all beings my heart-mind.

"The foolish man looks for happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet."  James Oppenheim

About Lama Surya Das

Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. He has spent nearly forty years studying Zen, Vipassana, Yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with the great old masters of Asia. He is the author of the best-seller "Awakening the Buddha Within" and a dozen other books, a spokesperson for American Buddhism, the founder of the Dzogchen Center, and is affectionately called "The American Lama" by the Dalai Lama.

Today, Lama Surya Das lectures, teaches and leads meditation retreats throughout the world. For more information about attending a retreat or a public event appearance please visit www.surya.org.

You can submit questions to Lama Surya Das via Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter. Submit to Facebook by commenting on the Ask the Lama post, submit through Tumblr by clicking on the Ask the Lama tab, and submit via Twitter by sending a tweet to @LamaSuryaDas and including the AskTheLama.

Enlightened Leadership: Kings, Queens and the 99 Percent

I watched the inauguration on Monday and thought about how desperately our county needs visionary enlightened leadership. As President Obama takes on the next four years, I pray for the safety and flourishing of his young family and for an era of self-control as well as gun control, to help us safeguard our society and ourselves from the violence and strife characteristic of people not at peace with themselves.

Buddha's renowned Eightfold Noble Path is the world's oldest extant business plan. His business is happiness, fulfillment, peace, harmony and spiritual enlightenment. It involves "right speech," "right livelihood," and "right action," and wise mindfulness as well as other aspects of how to conduct our lives -- at home and at work, including cultivating awareness, living in the now, and loving-kindness and sacred activism cum compassion in action.

What is right livelihood? It is our real work, and true vocation; making a life and not just a living -- growing ourselves while growing our career and family -- and something we must co-create together in our workplace and community. This includes cultivating mindfulness of how we consume, what, when, where and why, to help steward our planetary and local resources and be healthier and fit spiritually. Mahatma Gandhi, one of my beacons, taught that there is enough on this planet for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed; it is crucial for us to consider putting this simple equation into practice these days, now more than ever.

All that we seek is available within: not just within ourselves but within each other, each relationship and encounter -- each moment. Let's exploit our own innate natural resources for a change, and give our external pushiness and resources a break. In this fast-paced and stressful era, we must find ways and means to acquire the skills needed to balance tough business decisions in our straitened economy and uncertain times with empathy and compassion. We must balance equanimity and objectivity with compassion and caring to avoid disillusionment and burnout. We are all Buddhas by nature, temporarily obscured by adventitious emotions and illusions; we only have to awaken to that fact. This I believe is our true and first spiritual task.

My advice to leaders in all walks of life is to recognize the interwovenness of us all, not just we humans, and to get involved, become better informed, empathic, engaged and active. Let us not give in to the tyranny of mediocrity and the death of facts. I myself have lived around the world for years, and know that if I knew everything about any subject -- which seems all but impossible today-- I might very well have a very different opinion about it. This helps mitigate any tendency to dogmatism I might fall prey to. And working in the religious and spiritual field, there's no shortage of rigidity and fanaticism.

As the female Indian spiritual master Vimala Thakar has written, "We are the weavers of the fabric of modern society. We can weave love, truthfulness and peace or we can weave hatred, mistrust and war. We will have to wear whatever fabric we weave." Martin Luther King Jr. never forgot that all life is interrelated and that we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. He called this the "beloved community," which he gradually came to see and understand intuitively as his own congregation and true community.

Remember that life may be but a dream, but now is the time to row your boat. Isn't it better to co-create a good dream for ourselves and our loved ones rather than a nightmare? Offer your selves, your vessel, and your boat by developing a greater, long-term relationship to life and appreciating one's meaningful part in the whole. There is no sitting back. Life is precious and tenuous; handle with prayer.

We are all leaders, each in our own ways. Let's inculcate leadership in the young'uns rather than mere followership. I aspire to be The Altruistic Guardian-Bodhisattva of Children, and lift them all up in my burgundy lama robe. Won't you join me?

For more by Lama Surya Das, click here.

Follow Lama Surya Das on Twitter:  www.twitter.com/LamaSuryaDas

Co-Meditation

I came upon this rather enlightening article– “Don’t Just Sit There” –in the New York Times and thought it obviously relevant for us all, especially meditators and contemplatives, writers, thinkers, Buddhist geeks and other sedentary denizens of the great Immobile State.

As a writer who spends seemingly endless hours at my computer, I’ve learned to value a movement break as much as a breath break!  I’ve also found there are many options for “moving”. Walking meditation, yoga or tai chi are all interesting choices, as well as working with a physical trainer to focus on a more skillful work-out. If Buddha were alive and teaching today-and he is-he’d probably add a few extra innings to his anciently, tried and true Eight-fold Noble Path, such as Right Exercise, Right Relationships and GoodHumor. What we need is to seek out 21st century means of exercising our physical temples as well as our energy and spirit.

Hemingway hacked away at his typewriter while standing and H. D. Thoreau of Walden Pond, former writer-in-residence at my neighborhood swimming hole, said that he got rusty if he didn’t walk four hours a day. His favorite pastime was what he called ‘sauntering’.  Personally, I saunter many Friday mornings around the hills and forests, lakes and meadows of my beloved Concord, with my Unitarian minister friend and Dharma comrade Kim Harvie. We follow in the footsteps of the torchbearers of old–the Transcendentalist philosophers who were like the first American Buddhists, going into the woods and wilds for sustenance, noble solitude, spiritual solace, and inspiration; we seek what they sought, while moving our bodies and our energies in what I have come to call Co-Meditation.

About Lama Surya Das

Lama Surya Das is one of the foremost Western Buddhist meditation teachers and scholars. He has spent nearly forty years studying Zen, Vipassana, Yoga, and Tibetan Buddhism with the great old masters of Asia. He is the author of the best-seller "Awakening the Buddha Within" and a dozen other books, a spokesperson for American Buddhism, the founder of the Dzogchen Center, and is affectionately called "The American Lama" by the Dalai Lama.

Today, Lama Surya Das lectures, teaches and leads meditation retreats throughout the world. For more information about attending a retreat or a public event appearance please visit www.surya.org.

Life in Buddha Standard Time

The 14th-century Christian theologian and mystic, Meister Eckhart, said: "To reach the now, where one is present to oneself and to God therein, I say to you, be awake."

It's so simple that it's complicated.

People often ask me: How can I make time for meditation, yoga, prayer and retreats when there is no time? Should I get up earlier? Stay up later? Work faster or less? What about my family and relationships? How do I create spiritual space for myself?

But there's an underlying question: How can I give anything up? When everything in our lives feels equally important we begin to burn out. Even resting doesn't feel safe or restful.

I think it's important to pause and consider our priorities. Everyone can make more time for themselves, however brief. Even when my life is at its busiest I remember to take a breath break, to enjoy moments of mindfulness throughout the day. I inhale, relax, exhale, center and smile. Then, refreshed and renewed, I return to what I was doing. This is how Ienter the realm of Buddha Standard Time, the wholly now, throughout each day. Each and every moment is a stepping stone to heaven, nirvana, the high ground within.

Tuning into the present, the moment, is curative, a natural medicine. It heals us because it allows us to connect to the holy now -- the sacred within mundane, conventional time.
Rest is sacred. This is not a new concept. The spiritual culture of India has long understood that faster is not necessarily better; we need meaningful time to accomplish our best self's aims and purposes. Tibetan Buddhism's esoteric Diamond Path reveals that right now is the perfect time, right here is the perfect place, our presence is sublime, it is the perfectly appropriate teaching lesson and each of us is the ideal person to be where we are right now. (Perhaps this last perfection is the hardest to swallow because of the critical way we habitually see ourselves.) These are called the Five Diamond Perfections, a marvelous system of elevating how we view the world and all things in it, which can ultimately reveal the innate light of divinity, the Buddhaness or Buddha nature, in everyone and everything.

Once taking a breath break has become a part of your day, try a more advanced practice of inquiry and reflection by asking: Why do I feel that I must do what I'm doing right now? And whom am I doing it for? If you're overwhelmed, look for the wiggle room. What can you do to make things manageable -- the project, the to-do list or the obligation -- to avoid being overwhelmed? It sounds basic, but this is a life-saving practice because it greatly helps reduce the stress and tension that both wears our physical organism and enervates our energies, which is our life force and vitality.

Personally, I find it extremely helpful to focus on trying to do less and be more. This lets me leverage my time, energy and resources more effectively, while emphasizing meaningful time and activities that matter. We can learn mindful time management through breath breaks and reflection, by returning our awareness to the present moment -- one moment at a time -- and catching ourselves before the busyness of our lives overwhelms and entangles us, since this so often leads to unnecessary stress and even victimization. This nowness-awareness is living in Buddha Standard Time.

Become the master of yourself and your life, rather than a victim of obligations and conditions, by cultivating this process of awakening to the present and practicing it again and again. Carry on with this practice until it naturally and spontaneously starts to carry you. This is spiritual practice with benefits.

There is a meditator's lesson I first encountered as a young child playing hide-and-seek, and later as a three sport athlete: The more still and focused I become -- in body and mind -- the more clearly I am able to see. And as I see things clearly, more and more things become clear to me. This is a manifestation of self-mastery and harmonious oneness through heightened awareness.

So what's the most important thing? To remember to catch yourself before things catch you; to take care by staying aware; and to live free in your own time. Breath breaks, reflection and seeing clearly are means of nowness-awareness, the ultimate therapy, freeing us from preoccupations with past and future concerns and healing our psychological conditioning and self judgment and limitations. Nirvana isn't an esoteric concept; it is right here and now, in this very moment. Living in the present helps us to be there while getting there during every moment of each day. This is life in Buddha Standard Time.

Lama Surya Das is the author of 'Buddha Standard Time: Awakening to the Infinite Possibilities of Now' (HarperOne, May, 2011).

To find out more about Lama Surya Das, visit http://www.surya.org/.

For more information on Surya’s books- visit http://www.surya.org/books/

You can also follow Lama Surya Das on  Twitter @LamaSuryaDas

Connect with Lama on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/lamasuryadas.

The Power of Prayer - Lama Surya Das

Only one popular Buddhist teacher has written a book about prayer, and that’s
Thich Nhat Hanh. Many Western Buddhists and mindfulness practitioners today seem unaware of the numerous prayerful traditions and practices of Buddhism in the old world. I myself savor the mystic poems, songs, chants, prayers and sacred music practices of Vajrayana Buddhism. Perhaps because Mahayana-Vajrayana Buddhism is very inclusive and open to eclecticism, I too feel that way. I wanted to share with you a prayerful poem gifted to me this month, from some Catholic friends.

“As we turn our lives to the crosswalk
of Lent’s dark journey,
let us locate ourselves in the intersection
and there open a holding space
to welcome the world.

Over these next weeks
exercise your holding heart
and make room for the world.
Go to your listening place.
Open up, within you,
open up around you,
a space wide and deep.

And in the quiet,
let the whole world
tumble in.
All the hurts and hopes of loved ones,
of enemies, of neighbors,
let them all in.
The complex tangles
of struggles personal and global,
let them in.

Summon the most ravaged and despairing.
Find room for those who are sorely afflicted.
Let them all come. Bar none!
Let this space hold and enfold them!
Let the expansive mystery of God’s love envelop
all that is confounding, disturbing, unresolved or unrealized.

Hold it, hold it all till it fills you.
Lift the brimming pitcher
and empty yourself into the vast vessel,
that is the Sacred Heart.”

To find out more about Lama Surya Das, visit www.surya.org/.

For more information on Surya’s books- visit www.surya.org/books/

You can also follow Lama Surya Das on Twitter @LamaSuryaDas

Connect with Lama on Facebook at www.facebook.com/lamasuryadas.