Rabbit Hole

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.”