Rabbit Hole

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.

Talk with Erik Davis and Maja D’Aoust. Gets right into big questions around the experience of meditation, the vastness of the territory, the multiplicity of practices, the relationship between insight and ethics, the mystery of human enlightenment and – to keep it modest – science and the nature of reality.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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?

Our century marks a New Age of Exploration, into an even more mysterious frontier, with empirical discoveries that may turn out to be every bit as revolutionary as the ones that undergirded the first Age of Enlightenment. One frontier here is the dreaming mind; and the new explorers are known as lucid dreamers.

What would we learn if we could merge parts of the human brain with those of other species? Might we hear the sounds of the past? Live in naked troops, swapping intimate experiences without words? Or build a new social network? A fun and wide-ranging conversation with two smart friends – Lori Marino and Ben Goertzel – published in the Christmas 2011 issue of New Scientist.

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.

“They have no future without us, the chimps, the elephant, the whales and the rest. None. The question that we, the keepers, are facing is whether we’d mind a future without them ” – “whether we’d be bothered by an Earth with no living vestiges of our own differently shaped selves.” – Charles Siebert

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

Wrote this for The New Scientist . It summarizes some of the different states of consciousness we pass through over the day and night.

Fun talk with writer scholar Erik Davis, including riffs on hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, scientific vs spiritual knowledge, the role of science journalists in describing the nature of reality, how ocean may shape mind, and more.

Jennifer Dumpert teaches a course on dreaming at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. A short video interview I did for her class, talking all about Aristotle and houses on wheels and “memory catching” Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.

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.