Apparent here and now, timeless, encouraging investigation, leading inwards…. When you pay attention to it, it becomes obvious, but if you are caught up with other thoughts, activities, or conversations, the sound seems to disappear as if it had never been there. Thus, the nada sound is something “…to be experienced individually by the …
Dear conscientious minds, Phenomenology meets Epistemology precisely on this point. Depending on how thick your mind construes certain features of experience corresponds to how much you believe in the fundamental existence of those features. What is the ground of being to you? How thick and sludgy is it perceived by you? This …
If you’ve come to enough Tuesday sessions you’ve probably heard Shawn or I mention Jhana meditation quite a lot. And you may wonder what is Jhana? The way I put it is: The Jhanas are a series of highly refined altered states induced via meditation. The jhanas create positive feedback loops of recurring extremely peaceful and pleasurable …
Where are the boundaries of control? Another week, another aspect of mind to deconstruct. This time, the sense of agency. A core principle in Stoicism is ‘don’t worry about things out of your control’. But where exactly is that division between what is in and out of your control? Let’s look! Starting with …
Teaching through non-teaching. Learning through non-learning Believe it or not, but if a baby falls into a pool of water it will naturally know to not breathe underwater. It will roll onto its back and float, despite never practising nor being taught to. (There are videos one can look up which demonstrate this – not …
Meditation is mostly a private endeavour. But we live in a world with other beings. We may have many incredible experiences during and because of mediation, and no one really knows exactly what you experience but yourself. However, we can try to share our experiences and insights as best we can with the powerful tool …
This Tuesday we’re going to explore doing insight meditation on the visual field. Doing so can help break us out of overly conceptual modes of visual perception, give rise to insights about how visual perception works, and move us closer to raw sensory experience. Such work can also teach us more about the impermance of …
Shawn and I are big fans of metta, as we believe love is a powerful attractor field which smooths out the rough textures in our minds, seeks unity and sameness, rather than difference and judgement. To love and be loved feels amazing, motivating and empowering. Love makes concentration easier while releasing contraction. Metta practice is …
This week we’re going to be meditating on the feeling-tone of sensations. Referred to as vedanā in Buddhist texts and valence or hedonic tone in psychology, it can be separated out from the phenomenal experience that gives rise to it. This has some major benefits. Learning to calmly observe and disidentify (disembed) from the feeling-tone …
We’ve done a lot of work here at Meditative.dev on noting experience. We’ve done this with simple labels (See, Hear, Feel) and more specific ones (Mahasi Sayadaw style (tingling, contentment, coolness, etc.) We’ve also done the latter socially, sharing our experience in realtime with others. Today we’re going to employ language, as we do with …
