Rabbit Hole

What a thrill it was for Jeff to be joined live by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello. They had an open and honest conversation about meditation and maintaining mental health in these wild times. Then Jeff led a short guided practice- with over 40k joining in from around the world. Amazing.  

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of The Consciousness Explorers Club, my friend Andrea Cohen made this beautiful 2-minute animation. The CEC is dedicated to the playful exploration of meditation, in a way that empowers participants and communities to be their own teachers.

This video was filmed at Omega Institute for our “Meditation Party” retreat. It features a guided meditation by Jeff on how to work with intrusive thoughts, and then Dan, Seb and Jeff all chat about their weird brains, along with members of the audience!

There are few activities more thrilling than the exploration of consciousness, particularly in the form of intelligent spiritual practice. A talk on some of the terrains of meditation experience and their attendant risks and benefits.

I hosted this animated panel at the 2013 Science and Nonduality conference in Holland. At least two of the participants – Lisa Cairns and Gary Weber – claim to have permanently transitioned to a state of spiritual oneness as described by mystics.

This talk from the 2013 Science and Nonduality conference is about how books on spiritual “oneness” seem to work their magic on readers, and how they might do so more often and more effectively.

Maybe meditation is something you want to pursue, maybe it isn’t. In this ten minute clip, I lay out my own reasons for practice, and discuss an experience I had on retreat that brought the whole thing home.

First We Make Brains, Then We Make Love! The power of communications technology to shape our brains and behaviours is a little scary. It may also be the greatest design opportunity of our generation.

Fifty million years ago we shared a common ancestor, a shared seed of mammalian sentience and emotionality. Then we split: one branch stayed on land, and one returned to the water. These two docs are about the mind that returned to the water. How did the ocean shape the brains, the societies, and the sensory worlds of whales and dolphins?

Two CBC Ideas documentaries on sleep and dreaming. We spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, and yet there is no consensus as to why. Sleep and dreaming are deeply mysterious. The more you examine them, the stranger and more variegated they get.

The hypnagogic state is perfect for problem solving. The question is: how do you retrieve solutions when you are charging into sleep, the notorious memory-obliterator? Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali each had one answer …

Made this site when The Head Trip – came out. If you click on each wheel segment you can read a little blurb about each different state of consciousness. Also excerpts the entire introduction of the book, and has some other stuff too.

Where exactly do these hypnagogic images come from, and is there any logic to their appearance? Are they a species of dream, and if so, do they appear suddenly, as fully developed dramas, or do they evolve more gradually, as part of some furtive and mysterious psychic progression? The dramatic tension is almost unbearable.

The mysterious psychologist Andreas Mavromatis – another obsessive classifier – spent a lot of time trying to work out the exact progression of hypnagogic experiences. Hypnagogia: the Everyman’s Trip.

In the interests of readability and accessible, and due to my near-uncontrollable ADD, I have injected Head Trip with every imaginable graphical teaching device. Foremost among these are the “passport stamps,” which end every chapter, and summarize where – in the wide wide mind – the reader-voyager has just been.

I love this drawing, with its explicit message that eight hours of “monophasic” or consolidated sleep – what we call a “good night’s sleep” in the West and consider a universal norm – is in fact only one option among many in the human kingdom. Like the brain, real sleep is plastic – you can stretch it out, chop it up – it’s like silly putty.

READ THIS POST. Arguably one of the greatest scientific figs ever assembled by Man, this post contains an impassioned rant about the importance of lucid dreaming and how it should kick off a new era of investigation into the mind.

Use this chart to hypnotize your friends. Actually it won’t help with that at all. But it will help with figuring out which of your friends can be easily hypnotized should you wish to bring the fuckers once and for all under your total beneficent control.

Here I’ve taken thousands of years of hard-won meditative wisdom and completely trivialized it in the form of a simplistic board game. No need to thank me, I’ll get my reward in the next life.

It’s fascinating to think about how the various mystical states all relate to one another. Former religious studies professor Robert Forman sees it as a progression outward. I tried to capture this in my comic panel.

“We will all be neurobiologists to some degree in the new millennium””James Austin.

For people of a particular disposition (nerds), mapping consciousness is a popular pastime; lots of psychologists and at least one neurologist have tried it out. It’s sort of the ultimate reduction, an attempt to jam that great, unquantifiable diffusion of consciousness into a nice, neat box.

By the end of the twentieth century, scientists had scoured the far reaches of the material world. It was then that a few brave travelers turned in a different direction: inward!

“Cities are plastic by nature. We mold them in our own images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them.” -Jonathan Raban, Soft City. I spent 2 years building an impressionist encyclopaedia of cities. Read about it here.

Around the Wheel … each state of consciousness animated by changes in global brain activation, from the Hypnagogic state at sleep onset through to the mysterious depths of Pure Awareness. Watch the animation!

I wanted Head Trip to feel accessible right from the start, hence this little comic, which touches on some of the book’s mysteries and revelations. My female protagonist appears one more time at the back of the book, post-superpower expression.

A summary of much of what I learned while writing and researching The Head Trip. Via expectations, suggestion and possibly even intention, we can learn to remix consciousness. We live in special-effects studios of the mind …

Can we know what it’s like to be a non-human animal? Most scientists and philosophers say we cannot. Others disagree. A talk on whales, kinship in nature, and the limits of human empathy and imagination.

How well do you know your own mind? The Wheel of Consciousness is an audio-visual journey through twelve distinct states of waking, sleeping and dreaming consciousness. The idea is to use moving image and music and narration to provoke each state of consciousness in the audience – that is, if they don’t nod off during the tedious bits.

In 2007 I spent 3 months traveling around California talking to various thinkers about the mind. Neurobiologists, developmental psychologists, philosophers, mystics and … Huston Smith, peerless perennialist.

Dreamy radio. Thirty minutes of craven lusty anguished interiority and writer Rodger Kamenetz’ “authentic self.”

Epigenetics has profound implications for what it means to be human. Not only are genes are not fate, it also seems as though their expression in life is shaped by the experience of our ancestors, who continue on inside us, their lived decisions echoing through the genome. Features interviews with McGill University’s Moshe Szyf, and Tel Aviv University’s Eva Jablonka.

Neurofeedback shows us we can learn to self-regulate our own mental processes using nothing but a few EEG leads and a computer program. It’s the late 20th century version of something meditators have been practicing for centuries…

An animated tour through waking, sleeping and dreaming consciousness, made by the Discovery channel. Features a fire-breathing dragon, a magical tennis ball, a lot of hand waving and an embarrassing pimp roll.

At the famous 92nd street Y in New York, Jeff Warren joins Dan Harris, as they chat with  CNN’s Anderson Copper to discuss their new book, “Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics.”

For fun here is one the many satiric pieces I wrote and voiced for The Current. I play a neurotic Canada being psychoanalyzed about my unfulfilling relationship with the US.

Publishing a book is a bit like firing one of those emergency flares into the air. You never know who it’s going to attract. Most of the time nobody. You set the flare off in the Arctic tundra, get excited for some human contact, the light dims, cold sets in, and you die of exposure. But once in awhile someone comes by to take a look. And once and a while they bring with them something really cool.