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, as it comes for us all, there’s nothing to fear, “for the things we’ve learned to care for will continue.”
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.
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.”
Any science of mind worthy of the name must try to isolate, describe, and understand the full continuum of changes that come about as a result of meditation and spiritual practice – including claims of awakening or enlightenment. Otherwise, the paradigm of the power of spiritual practice is missing its cornerstone.
“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.