Rabbit Hole

Book blurb: “In Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Dan Harris and his friend Jeff Warren, a masterful teacher and “Meditation MacGyver,” embark on a cross-country quest to tackle the myths, misconceptions, and self-deceptions that stop people from meditating.” Click to read book’s marketing description, plus my commentary.

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.

A true story about almost losing one’s mind.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

A collection of academic essays edited by Alex Kohav that explores personal, theoretical, and historical dimensions of mystical experience. Alex contacted me about including my New York Times piece “The Anxiety of the Long-Distance Meditator” – all about striving to get to “initial enlightenment” via advanced meditation. It didn’t really work.