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. The frontier 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.
“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
There’s a new mind theory out there … The theory is worth paying attention to because, well, it’s about you. Or at least two of you: the careful, analytic you, and your misguided shadow, who spends altogether too much time in the “wrong” section of the bookstore. One of you is a Mechanist. The other is a Mentalist. Though you may not realize it, you are two foot soldiers on opposing sides of a battle that began in utero…
I hosted this panel at the 2013 Science and Nonduality conference in Holland. At least two of of the participants – Lisa Cairns and Gary Weber – claimed to be in a permanent state of nondual consciousness. For those who don’t speak the lingo, they are what some Buddhist might call “enlightened” – i.e., their sense of being a separate self has collapsed, and they now apparently reside in a state of open unfixed “oneness” – whatever you take that to mean. Actually, what the hell that actually means is the subject of this panel.
By the end of the twentieth century, scientists had scoured the far reaches of the material world. It was then that a few brave travelers turned in a different direction: inward!
Wrote this for The New Scientist . It summarizes some of the different states of consciousness we pass through over the day and night.
This talk from the Science and Nonduality conference is about how nondual books seem to work their magic on the reader’s consciousness, and how they might do so more effectively and more often.
Maybe meditation is something you want to pursue, maybe it isn’t. In this ten minute mp3 I lay out my own reasons for practice, and discuss an experience I had on retreat that brought the whole thing home to me.
An animated tour through waking, sleeping and dreaming consciousness, made by a Discovery channel animator after Head Trip came out. Features a fire-breathing dragon, a psychedelic tennis ball, a LOT of hand waving, and one very embarrassing pimp roll.