Rabbit Hole

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.”

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.

If a practice is important to us, if it’s deepening our engagement with the world, if it’s teaching us about who we are, then you can be sure many of these basic skills are present and probably increasing. Understanding the skills is central to being your own life teacher, and to sharing practice with others.

Imagine a post-Apocalyptic landscape filled with careening hot rods, all kitted out with various high performance stylings, and all of them moving in the same direction. In this metaphor, our armada of vehicles represent the world’s contemplative and personal growth practices. They are beautiful in their freakish diversity.

Suddenly: you exist. You didn’t plan it or ask for it, but existence happened, and now, after a bunch of years bumping into coffee tables and staring at trees, full self-consciousness has flickered on, and you’re like: ‘wait a second … where am I? Who am I? And what am I supposed to DO here?’