Meditation is ultimately about dropping as much of the framework or understanding as we can, and beholding directly the mystery of existence. The more we shed our ideas about what the world is, the more intimately we can encounter it.
Why do I feel so desperately lonely?
Because “I am” is now invisible: it is ungraspable, uncertain, unstable, perpetually withheld from my reach. “I am” is always becoming and persists at the end of time. “I am” is inexhaustible movement, relationship, fluxing transition between states. But “I am” is breathing me when “I think” I am breathing it. It is an affirmation of my existence. It is Change. Always changing (thank God, always changing).
There are few activities more thrilling than exploring consciousness, particularly in the form of intelligent spiritual practice. In this talk, Jeff Warren – founder of The Consciousness Explorers Club and author of The Head Trip – introduces us to the terrain and describes some of the attendant risks and benefits. What begins as an exploration can become a transformation. The question then is how to talk – or not talk – about your experience, in a secular world often suspicious of spirituality.
This primer is about the broadest possible classes of meditation and spiritual experience. It’s a work-in-progress. Every time I come back, I find myself cutting more details, for they seem like technique-specific effects, and not the human universals I once imagined. So it goes. In a couple years there may be nothing here at all.
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.