Rabbit Hole

We are – Buddhist thinking goes – locked into unhelpfully narrow views of reality, meta-trances imposed by the preoccupations and formulations of our conditioning and language and culture.

We can start pretending, in a vaguely schizoid way, that existence / nature / whatever responds to our overtures, indeed, that the whole container is a 360-degree dance partner keeping time with your every move.

On Tuesday I presented to Canadian university students as part of the “Empowering Neurodiversity” series, hosted by the University of Alberta. Video of the talk has already been posted online – check it out below if you’re curious. It was a hilarious experience, at least for me. As always when I try to discuss ADHD, […]

A big post about ADHD and meditation – a resource for ADHD folks, as well as those who wish to guide ADHD folks in meditation – will appear here within the next day or two.

If at the start it’s our own stress and unhappiness we work to address, at some point – if we’re genuinely opening – the direction of concern reverses. Energy formerly bound up in self-interest starts to get re-directed towards others.

I wonder if our civilization is about to enter a New Age of Exploration. Except this time, since all the physical real estate has been chewed up, the terrain is internal. Not just our individual minds, but the mind of nature – the mother-sea mind, the great oceanic source of awareness that all contemplative traditions speak to in different ways.

Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young refers to Three Fundamental States of Experience: Solid, Liquid and Gas. It’s sort of a metaphor and sort of not. Because it turns out that just as the material world can go through fundamental state changes – can have its particles rearranged to move from, say, ice to water to vapor (and back) – so can you.

Forget dissolving my sense of being a separate self. I have two kids now. My boundaries are well and truly dissolved (“trampled” is probably more accurate). What I need now is stability and ground. I need good boundaries, not no boundaries. Here’s a meditation to help with this – for everyone, especially parents!

The meditation scene is littered with “spiritual bypassers” who shoot for transcendence because they can’t handle the world – and the self – they’ve inherited. This isn’t a judgement; people are in pain, and meditation can help with that pain. But it’s important to remember that some of the issues we uncover in practice can’t be healed by meditation only.

What does it mean to wake up? A lot of ink has been spilled on this subject, and every teacher in every tradition has a different way of talking about it, including not talking about it at all, which is probably the wisest tactic.

A new musical collaboration with producer / DJ / sound wizard / friend Noah Pred. The idea of this 12-minute soundscape / meditation is to encourage listeners to adjust their consciousness from the inside, using music both as the object of meditation, and as a reflection of each real-time adjustment.

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 primer is about the broad stages of spiritual experience that can happen to committed long-term meditators, with an emphasis on the challenges. Knowing about these – having a context – can help people move through them more quickly.

A true story about almost losing one’s mind.

Think about a time when you were most in the zone, most in flow – not only with some central object of concentration, but with the whole wide world around you.

Back in my twenties, I had this idea of living life like an adventure story. So I did. Until I realized the ratio of fun to struggle was moving in the wrong direction. The fun was getting briefer and more desperate; the challenges were getting longer and more all-encompassing.

Do these modalities all work, or none, or only some? And what can a person realistically expect as they undertake these different practices?

When it comes to meditation, the CEC has a split-focus: we explore meditation as a life skill, and we explore meditation as a transformative path. Although each may use the same technique, they involve two very different approaches and intentions.

I knew parenting would be rewarding and challenging. I didn’t know it would be everything – like the life I had before, except now in 3-D, with the vanishing point always in sight.

Sometimes I’m an idiot of a very particular type. When I see a person in any kind of hurt, I experience a seizure of compulsive helpfulness. I say the words, perform the gestures, provide the resources, and sometimes make the commitments I later realize are beyond my power to make and may not actually be that helpful in the first place.

A more realistic take on the so-called “evolution” of consciousness: an increase in discernment and sensitivity, largely driven forward by young people. It’s obvious why young people see and experience bias and discrimination at a level of nuance many in older generations cannot: they aren’t habituated yet.

I have a theory, a theory based on experience. And that’s what my theory is about: the feedback loop between our ideas about reality, and our experience of reality. An exploration and critique of spiritual growth and understanding, with a new ending to make everything extra useless and confusing.

In March of 2012, myself and twenty other “adept” meditators participated in an experiment to try to answer the question: what is the real resting state of the brain? Strange things happened. An exploration of one view of so-called “enlightenment.”

“Stream entry,” is a Buddhist term for initial enlightenment — a shift in perspective where the practitioners’ mind flips inside-out, and for a split-second recognizes its own inseparability from the rest of the natural world.

Meditation and other contemplative practices seem to accelerate the aging-gracefully gradient. They are ways of thinning out in the prime of life – a kind of dying in the midst of the everyday. Then when death does come, there’s nothing to fear, for – as Bertrand Russel wrote – “the things we care for will continue.”

The benefits of mindfulness meditation have very quickly become one of the good-news mental health stories of our time. But meditation also has a shadowy seam. Is there a link between some forms of mental illness and the freedom promised at the heart of meditation? My column on the infamous “Dark Night of the Soul”

Fourteen years ago Gary Weber’s thoughts disappeared, and all his suffering vanished with them. Was it the disappearance of his thoughts that saved him, or is something else going on?

This piece on whale consciousness and animal personhood won a Gold and a Silver medal at the 2012 Canadian National Magazine Awards. Whales are people too; the science proves it. Are humans ready to see them as equals?

Communications technology is often accused of dissociating us from the natural world. A little thought-experiment that explores how the next generation of “augmented reality” technologies might close this gap, and help us hear like an elephant and think like a squirrel.

Scientists and philosophers have long erected an insurmountable barrier between humans and animals. This seems to be changing. The human imagination is moving outward. The animals are coming. Hide the nuts!

What kind of mind do we need to address climate change and environmental degradation? A mountain eco-laboratory in northern New Mexico looks at four possible answers: a social mind, a creative mind, a receptive mind and an equanimous mind.

Proponents of nonduality tell us that we take a leap of faith and actually live our lives from the truth of direct experience, eventually the age old barrier between inside and out will erode. A report from the 2013 Science and Nonduality conference in Holland.

Western psychology is still outgrowing a reactive skepticism towards the subjective anecdote that it inherited from behaviorism. Fortunately, this is changing. These days, there is a growing appreciation among investigators that if you want to understand consciousness – as opposed to just brain activity – you have to start taking first-person reports seriously. This will soon include reports of human “enlightenment.”

What does the practice of dynamic care look like in real life? From protesting to sewing masks, from making documentary films to listening to records to exploring genealogy, in this article I showcase a range of creative practices, submitted by all of you. The community is the teacher.

The Dream Director is not unlike a set of DJ turntables, only the medium it remixes is the mind – the proto medium. As the DJ, the user can select from an infinite number of effects. The weirder the combination, the stranger the conjured world… come remix the dreaming mind.

What might science look like in another reality? In lucid dreaming, an investigator can form a hypothesis in waking, fall asleep, become lucid, and then – in rainbow lab coat and marvellous wind-swept Vidal Sassoon hairdo – test her hypothesis as the dream surges around her.

“If someone says ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ one more time I am literally going to punch them.” A post is about knowing when and how to meditatively engage with our anxiety and our discomfort, and knowing when and how to pull back and rest.

The most important element for sustaining a meditation practice isn’t what practice to do, or how to do it, it’s how to show up, day after day. It’s structure.

When you live on a ship at sea, everything gets amplified in the narrow interiors: ruminations, moods, behaviors. Enter COVID-19, and the fact that many of us are stuck inside. Ping ping ping, go the signals. I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get a clear picture of what I’m comfortable with, and what I’m not. 

Healing and growth, self-regulation and self-understanding — these are too idiosyncratic, too personal, too fundamental to depend on specialists-only. We also need to depend on ourselves and one another. In my mind, nothing will accelerate this more than recasting “teaching” as a creative social activity that any informed person can engage in.