Enlightenment

How to Explore Consciousness – Talk

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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.

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Spiritual Terrains and Challenges

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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.

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Living Nonduality – Panel

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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.

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Enlightenment’s Evil Twin

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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”

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