2010 February 08 « Rev. Danny Fisher

February 8, 2010

A Gift of Dharma for 2.8.10

Today’s quote is another from His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the leader of the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism, whom I previously quoted and wrote a short bio for in this post. Today’s quote is an exchange from His Holiness’ interview this past fall with Tyler Dewar for Bodhi (a publication for which Dewar serves as contributing editor). The interview features some very striking insights and teachings on a range of subjects. (In particular, I was really interested in what His Holiness had to say about families and children, and understanding the role of the dakinis in Vajrayana practice.) Their conversation about the Information Age, however, deserves highlighting here:

TYLER DEWAR: It is clear that we live now in an era where there are many technological developments happening, particularly with regard to the way people communicate with each other. We have mobile smart phones, social networking websites, blogs, and perhaps a bit of anxiousness about how others respond to us in these venues. There is a lot of information bouncing around in our day-to-day lives. Some practitioners feel this to be too much information, but, at the same time, these new ways of communicating don’t seem to be fading away. It seems like they are going to be a part of our lives as we move into the future. What is your view of the evolution of communications technologies in relationship to the lifestyles of dharma practitioners? What advice would you give dharma practitioners who might be struggling with the balance between engaging with all of this information and the meditation cushion?

HIS HOLINESS THE KARMAPA: With the Internet and other technologies, we certainly live in the midst of an information-heavy era. We can receive a lot of information in very short periods of time. For dharma practitioners, the most important thing is to examine the changes in our body, speech, and mind that occur when we receive these chunks of information, and to discern whether the way we are responding is helpful to us.

In the past, most of the information we received throughout the day was more or less directly related to our own experience, things we were perceiving in an immediate sense. These days, much of the information we engage with throughout the day is not directly related to our own experience, but we still invest a lot of our energy in it, and we see that it changes the state of our mind. For practitioners, it is important to nevertheless intentionally relax our minds and make sure that our minds have a chance to take their own seat of stability.

February 8, 2010

Buddhist Hospice Chaplain Hollie Laudal Blogs for the Examiner

The author (left) with Hollie Laudal (right) in 2006.

My old friend Hollie Laudal, with whom I graduated from the M.Div. program at Naropa University, has just started writing a blog for the Examiner. Hollie is a hospice chaplain, and her first post reflects on the evolution of the role of the health care chaplain. Here’s a choice snippet:

Chaplains play interesting roles. Many people assume that chaplains are Christian, and they react based on their assumptions. We see reactions from, “Oh, a Christian. I’m not interested in that Jesus crap” to the other extreme of, “Oh, please help my mother to accept Jesus into her heart before she passes.”

Chaplains have to ride the edge of these extremes, never knowing which they might get. For the most part, however, people fall somewhere between them. They are learning that chaplains are not present to perform particular services, but rather to ask the questions, “What services do YOU want? What do you want this process to look like?” This, of course, may included prescribed ritual, but a chaplain would not assume this before learning it directly from the patient and family.

Stay tuned for more from Hollie here.

In addition, my pal Tyler Mountain has also started blogging for the Examiner. Read his first post about about budget constraints and the suspension of critical thinking classes at the University of Colorado here.