Let’s Help Regulate Each Other 

Self-regulation requires continual effort and prioritization. I’ve often resented this. I’d have prefered to just be born and coast. But mental health doesn’t work like that any more than physical health does. Due diligence and care are required. Also awareness about what will help keep you stable and functional, and about what dysregulation looks like for you. What are your early warning signs? They’re a bit different for everyone, and they change over our lifetime. Often we end up ignoring them, and then all of a sudden our demons are piling into us like a Jackie Chan fight scene.
That’s what happened to me. Sometimes it takes a crisis to wake us up. Then we have no choice but to get help.

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Trances We Have Known and Loved

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.

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How to Explore Consciousness – Talk

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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Mansion of the Mind – Animation

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.

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Living Nonduality – Panel

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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