I would not be teaching meditation if not for Asian cultures. There would be no meditation apps, no secular mindfulness, no Consciousness Explorers Club. They made it all possible. Below I pay respect to these and other lineages, roughly in the order they landed in my life.
But first …
Why Acknowledgement is Important
It’s important because it situates us in our life. We know where we are by knowing where we came from and who inspired us. This orients us, and connects us to our larger human story.
It’s also important to the larger community of humans around us. Part of meditation is learning to see some of the unconscious biases and distortions that happen in our minds and our behaviours – that cause us and others suffering – and no longer going along with them. Or at least trying to no longer go along with them.
The same dynamic is true in mass society; we can collectively “wake up” and begin to see ways in which the whole culture has been acting unconsciously and causing suffering. One of these ways is cultural appropriation. Dominant cultures have always taken what they’ve wanted from others. This caused and still causes a lot of pain: of being stereotyped, of being trivialized and exploited and plundered, of not being understood and respected.
We can mitigate some of this by practicing appreciation instead of appropriation. Many of us are not great at this, myself included. It’s a good thing to work on.
First Lineage: Mystery
I exist! What’s the deal with this existence situation? I’ve wondered about this since I was a kid; at no point did existing not seem … just … weird.
Thus my first lineage belongs to every human who ever wondered what it was all about.
Second Lineage: Exploring Consciousness
I can explore existence! Not only by rooting around in the external world, but also by turning around and exploring my own mind. As a kid, I experimented with visualizing infinity. As a teen, I practised lucid dreaming. As a college student, I experimented with psychedelics and other ways of altering my consciousness. Good times!
Eventually I got into learning all I could about the science of consciousness. An early influential book for me was Charles Tart’s Altered States of Consciousness anthology, which came out in 1969. Tart helped popularize the understanding that consciousness changes, and that we can explore different states. Hypnosis, meditation, dreaming, psychedelics – all of these were discussed in this single volume.
In in my early thirties I published my own book about all this – about sleep and dreaming and hypnosis and more – and called it The Head Trip.
My second debt of gratitude goes to all those explorers and scientists and autodidact weirdos who have deliberately tried to explore their own minds and then bore all their friends about it.
Third Lineage: Buddhism* and the End of Suffering
Maybe exploring can help me! For most of the 20th century, the bulk of the scientific research on consciousness had focused on either external behaviour, or objective brain activity. Subjective experience was considered unreliable and unquantifiable. When I began writing Head Trip, this had begun to change – “first person approaches” were suddenly all the rage.
The question researchers were asking was: how to go about this rigorously? Who can we look to for expertise and insight?
Enter: Buddhist thinkers and practitioners, the new stars of the interdisciplinary consciousness conferences I’d begun attending as a journalist in the early 2000s. Not only did these meditators have brilliant scholarly models for understanding consciousness, they themselves had first-person experience with a range of fascinating states and mental phenomena that most Western researchers had hardly heard of. Hence: monks in labs, festooned with electrodes.
I was hooked, and not just on the nascent science. I began attending meditation retreats, studying with different Buddhist schools and teachers. I figured out that my real interest in consciousness wasn’t actually academic at all – it was personal. I was … not happy. My mind had twisted me in knots, and now the simple act of getting still had begun to help me.
Buddhist techniques showed me one way to more peace and connection, and Buddhism in general gave me a beautiful and influential personal framework for understanding my experience. Buddhism showed me what was possible. You never stop feeling grateful for that.
My third debt of gratitude goes to the historic Buddha Shakyamuni, that wandering forest rascal who worked out a systemic approach to all of this.
Fourth Lineage: Mindfulness and Shinzen Young
Except … I’m still messed up! Enter Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young. A geeky contemplative neuroscience consultant from Los Angeles, Shinzen was initially ordained in Japanese Vajrayana, and then influenced by S.N. Goenka’s style of vipassana, by Sasaki Roshi’s style of Zen, and by perennial mystical philosophy more generally.
Not only did Shinzen have a whole jungle gym of fascinating meditations to explore, he is also a brilliant translator of Asian ideas and languages. Shinzen’s meditation system is built from dynamic categories that anyone can relate to: seeing, hearing, and feeling; flowing or static; present or absent; expanding or contracting, etc. He helped me see how consciousness in the moment is a bit like fluid dynamics, with certain properties and fairly predictable rules of operation. He also gave me a way to think about the skills we bring to meditation – among them, concentration, clarity, and equanimity – how each of these “work” in each moment, and the different ways they get trained in different practices.
This is the Shinzen I encountered in 2008. For a good ten years I attended his retreats and recorded our regular phone conversations. Shinzen has thought clearly about so much in meditation and life – you can ask him anything, and he will eventually take it back to the rich phenomenology of our lived experience, rarely reaching past to some unfounded statement he can’t prove. If he does go there, it is usually with the caveat: “If I had to make a conjecture …” In this way I got to shine my Shinzen flashlight onto our human experience of the moment; he gave me a sense of the outer contour of what can be said with certainty, and what cannot be said at all.
My fourth debt of gratitude goes to Shinzen Young, and my friends and colleagues in the lineage of Unified Mindfulness, Shinzen’s school of meditation. For a taste of Shinzen’s precision nerdery, I recommend his original 1997 audio series “The Science of Enlightenment” (NOT the same as the eponymous book, published much later).
Other Influential Books and Teachers
Mystical Experience
William James
and Evelyn Underhill wrote my favourite books on varieties of religious and mystical experience, with a focus on “perennial” insights into the human encounter with reality. Most of these have to do with an “Absolute” and thus are confounding and ineffable. So it goes! Other important perennial figures for me have been Lex Hixon and Peter Russell. I also really enjoy the many religious studies critiques of perennial philosophy.
Nonduality
“Nonduality” is a multi-faceted school of Indian thinking whose ambition is to explore the fundamental nature of (one, shared) Being, through an inquiry into awareness itself. Different teachers articulate this in different ways. Notable influences are Sri Ramana Maharshi, Rupert Spira, Frances Lucille, Adyashanti, Mukti, Lama Lena, Douglas Harding, Angelo Dilullo, Loch Kelly, and others.
Embodiment
The physical practice of yoga was my initial way into the wisdom of embodiment, and has helped to get me out of my head. I’ve had dozens of excellent yoga and movement teachers, including my good friends Scott Davis and Therese Jornlin. Therese is also my Qi Gong teacher – not only has she changed the way I experience my body’s energy, she has also transformed my understanding of the breath and the wisdom of cycles. I also learned a lot about embodiment through my training in Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing – thank you Jan Winhall – my training in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, and my academic study of embodied cognition.
Nature
For about 10 years I had the privilege of exploring “deep ecology” alongside friends Paul Wapner, Kritee Kanko, David Abram, and other passionate scientists and educators over at Earth Love Go and the Lama Foundation. Countless personal ceremonies and journeys have bolstered this view.
Diversity and Activism
This DIY pluralistic community spirit of The Consciousness Explorers Club (see below) found inspiration for me in the philosophy and practices of “harm reduction” in the party scene, in the Mad Pride movement, in the ever-expanding neurodiversity movement (especially the work of Devon Price), and in the work of gay, trans and BIPOC activists to create their own systems of mental and emotional support outside of the mainstream.
Many excellent POC teachers point to the “white-washing” that can happen in Buddhist practice communities, where a focus on some vague universal oneness can be used as a way to trivialize and marginalize the many challenges related to diversity and social justice. I’ve personally learned a lot here from Lama Rod Owens and Sebene Selassie.
Friends and Community
Every spiritual (and secular) path and tradition has elements that are uniquely their own.
These differences matter. They matter in terms of their unique cultural and historical legacies. They matter because different temperaments will be attracted to different aesthetics and styles of practice. This means each of us can find a path that suits us, and if we can’t find that path, then we can create our own.
I founded the Consciousness Explorers Club as a way to explore exactly this pluralism. I’m incredibly grateful for my friends and fellow explorers James Maskalyk, Erin Oke, Avi Craimer, Jude Star, Kevin LaCroix, and Tasha Schumann. The CEC is all about the empowerment side of practice – the idea of “being your own teacher” inside a supportive community of fellow practitioners and explorers, everyone sharing their own weird customized practices and learning how to guide each other. This is also the central animating idea behind the Mind Bod Adventure Pod that I cohost with Tasha.
I would not have made it through this life without the support of many healers, among them Diane Chung, Marlene Russell, Barb Ellias, Laura McNeilly, and Shannon Myers. This is also true of my writing community – Marni Jackson has been a great friend and writing mentor, as has Barbara Gowdy, and my friends Christine Pountney, Alayna Munce, Patricia Pearson, all of whom all hold it down in the writers-interested-in-how-to-be-human lineage.
Family
A note on the whole idea of service: ultimately this lineage came from my mother, Susan Warren. Even as a semi-lapsed Christian, she has always been a good neighbour and a passionate contributor to many charitable causes. Thanks Mom! You and Dad are my greatest tradition.
To my wife Sarah and my sons Eden and Sasha: I love you. You make it real.
And thank you, patient reader, for being part of this lineage of exploration and love.
In gratitude,
Jeff
Footnote : On the Complexity of Lineages
Above I acknowledge my huge debt to Buddhism – but, to which Buddhism?
I attended my first Buddhist meditation in my early 20s, at a Shambhala class in Montreal. I attended my first actual meditation retreat in my early 30s, at the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Scotland. Since then I have attended a large number of retreats from different Buddhist traditions and teachers and lineages, from Rinzai and Soto Zen, to Burmese-inspired vipassana, to more “American orthodox” style insight practices, to many others. For years I studied with Shinzen Young, who himself is a mongrel product of a number of lineages and teachers. I study with new people all the time, inside and outside of Buddhism.
It doesn’t help that Buddhism itself is a moving target – a dynamic living entity that morphs and adapts itself to different cultures and societies. The scholar David McMahan wrote a fine book called The Making of Buddhist Modernism that shows how the meditation practices we think of as quintessentially “Buddhist” are actually cherry-picked from select Asian schools, which themselves had been deliberately re-worked by Asian teachers in response to their own readings of late 19th century Western mysticism.
So: who exactly are we acknowledging, when we acknowledge Buddhism?
Everyone will answer this in their own way. For myself, I acknowledge the founder – Siddhattha Gotama – in every sit I do. I connect to him in my imagination, and through him, I visualize the various lineage energies flowing down to all the actual teachers I’ve met, who in their own ways have inspired and supported me. And then, at the end of each sit, I imagine passing it on, to everyone I know who might benefit from the teachings and the techniques. That’s one way to keep the whole thing dynamic and alive.
Jeff