Noah Levine, son of Buddhist author Stephen Levine and founder of "Against the Stream: Buddhist Meditation Society," speaks on Buddhism to Univ. of Southern California students.
Following the trend of many self-destructive youths, Noah Levine's search for meaning in Los Angeles -- a city of lost angels -- first led him to punk rock, drugs, drinking, and dissatisfaction. Fortunately, however, his search did not end there.
Having clearly realized the uselessness of drugs and violence from time spent in jail, while his parents and their friends became some of the most prominent Buddhists and meditators in the country, Noah looked for positive ways to channel his rebellion against what he saw as society's lies.
Author of Dharma Punx and Against the Stream, and most recently The Heart of the Revolution, Levine is now a Buddhist teacher, meditation instructor, author, and counselor.
He came to USC in 2009 and talked about how he channeled his anger and energy into the practice of Buddhism to awaken his natural wisdom and compassion. The program was sponsored by the USC Office of Religious Life, in association with USC Spectrum.
Sign up now and be a part of Against the Stream's Second Annual Sit-a-Thon. Join them for a lovely day of mindful practice dedicated to helping others. Commemorating a fateful day, this fundraiser for ATS's scholarship program is targeted specifically for the October retreat at Joshua Tree. Sitters are encouraged to raise funds by having friends and family sponsor them. They can support practitioners via an online donation, or sitters can bring cash, checks, or credit cards to the sit. All are welcome to come sit just for the sake of good practice -- allowing this to be a day of remembrance. Read about ATS's intention for the weekend.
The Los Angeles Timesexamines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland security" projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret" to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that -- which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all -- is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:
"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.More
Excavating the Heart through Buddhist mindfulness meditation Noah Levine (Huffington Post, Dharma Punx Against the Stream) When I first heard the Buddhist teachings on loving kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, I was incredibly skeptical.
Coming from a background of drugs and violence, I saw those heart qualities as undesirable and perhaps unsafe. In the circles I ran in, compassion was seen as equivalent to weakness and would make you vulnerable to harm and abuse.
I learned early on that this world was full of pain and seemed to lack much kindness. In reaction to the pain in my life, I began to close my heart and to harden myself against all forms of love. So it was with great hesitance that I experimented with Buddhist practices of kindness and compassion.
In the beginning, I don't think forgiveness was even in my vocabulary. The only reason I opened myself to these meditation practices, often called heart practices, at all was because I had tremendous faith in the practices of mindfulness (paying attention to the present moment), the Buddha, and my teachers, who assured me that it was safe to love again.
I heard things like "love is your true nature" or "the heart has a natural tendency toward compassion." Now I had already been meditating for some time, examining my inner-world through mindfulness, and I didn't see any of the love and compassion of which these teachers spoke.
When I looked into my heart and mind I only saw fear, anger, hatred, judgment, more fear, and a lot of lustful cravings. When I sat quietly, paying attention to my breath, my attention was repeatedly drawn into fantasies of vengeful destruction or pornographic sex:
One moment I was bashing in my stepfather's head with a Louisville slugger, the next I was in a threesome with Madonna [pictured here in green cap] and Traci Lords [against wall].
I was pretty sure that was all that was in there. Mindfulness helped me deal with my inner confusion. It allowed to me to ignore my mind at times or not take it so personally at others, but it didn't seem to be magically creating a loving heart out of my inner-critic/terrorist/pervert/tough guy.
In the early days of my meditation practice I was only interested in mindfulness. I was introduced to breath awareness meditations and as a result I experienced the direct benefits of concentration and mindfulness. I immediately found temporary relief from fear of the future and shame about the past.
Learning to train my mind to pay close attention to the present moment was difficult, but fruitful. I experienced the immediate, if only momentary, relief from the suffering I created with my mind's tendency to be lost in the future and past.
Before I began my meditation practice, when my mind started to worry about what would happen in the future, I would get completely sucked into the fears and often become convinced that the worst-case scenario would play out.
Mindfulness gave me the tools to let go of those thoughts and to bring my attention into the body's experience of the breath. Mindfulness made sense to me and it wasn't difficult to gain a verified faith [saddha] in that aspect of Buddhism. For me, mindfulness proved to be the doorway to the rest of the Buddha's Dharma, or teachings. I came to believe that it was going to be possible to train my mind, but I still had no hope for my heart. More
