Rabbit Hole

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

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.