Dear Jules -

As a (fellow) Shinzen student for a few years now, it was great to see your post.

I'm listening right now to a really good interview of Shinzen that was done in August of this year by a friend of mine called “The Fourth Dimension of Spirituality.” In there, he talks about the application of “mindfulness meditation” to the various aspects of the experience in pain, so that, with mindfulness, they are experienced in an additive rather than multiplicative fashion: where each element of the experience would otherwise reinforce the other, "going from multiplicative overwhelm to additive manageability." (From there he builds on that foundation of mindfulness [Vipassana] and goes into a discussion of the Buddhist concept of leaving the limited identity, and then into Zen mysticism and the role of the mystical experience in modern neuroscience. But no one has to go there in order to appreciate his fundamental insight on the distinction between additive and multiplicative processing of experience, thereby distinguishing between pain and suffering: which is just a huge concept in it's own right.)

The interview is available online through an interesting very late night program that runs out here in LA on the local Pacifica Radio Network station, KPFK, called "Something's Happening With Roy of Hollywood." It ran on October 27, 2006, following an utterly amazing lecture from the late Alan Watts from the Sixties on "Suchness."

Listen to it when you've got about 3 hours to kick back, but they are highly recommended. In fact, the two talks compliment each other beautifully. Both are really worth listening to, although the Watts’ talk clips along at such a fast pace – one that he got to by smoking something like 4 packs of cigarettes a day – that you can probably hear it four times over and still be finding new and amazing things in there. But even on the first pass, it's just staggering, and I mean that in the best sense.

Go here http://kpfk.org/index.php?option=com...id=135&lang=en scroll down the blue column in the middle to October 27th, and then click on play in the green column on the right. [Part A.] Roy is a little talky for the first few minutes, but once the talks get going they are great.

I've put this up before in BT1, but the other thing that folks know about is the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) that was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the Univ. of Mass. Medical School almost 30 years ago, and now has thousands of trained instructors around the country. (I wound up getting to Shinzen through an MBSR instructor to whom I was referred by a pain psychologist four years ago last month.) This is highly focused on pain patients, in which they are taught both awareness of mind and body through meditation, yoga and small group therapy over a period of about 8 weeks. For more information, including finding an MBSR instructor in your area, go to http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/

But please, check out the Roy of Hollywood program, which will be achieved for another 6 weeks or so. It’s a real treat.

Mike