Explanations
Roger explains his current belief that pleasure does not exist in any added/solidifying phenomenal content, but rather is the interpretation of contracted phenomenal content (w/negative valance) releasing or disappearing from experience. This insight may be essential for letting go of certain attachments to sense pleasures and even attachments to particular high valenced states of mind; which ultimately leads to awakening.
Figuring out what is actually the thing we think is worth experiencing more of, matters! If we are confused about what is the good in life, then we will go about trying to live a good life in ineffective ways.
Video Summary: To end dissatisfaction you must give up on the belief in satisfaction. No moment of experience will ever contain a feeling of satisfaction. And so long as you still buy into this myth you will keep feeling disappointed by sensate experiences to some degree.
In order to relinquish the notion that an experience of satisfaction is possible, it is not enough just to be convinced conceptually. You must thoroughly observe your experience in great detail, never finding a moment of pure satification, to the point that you exhaust the seeker and sufficient enough layers of your being give up on the idea as a whole.
Finally, you have become convinced to your bones that there is no ultimate gratifying experience to wait for, and then what is left is what I call true happiness.
In this video Roger explains how gaining a lasting insight into emptiness is somewhat analogous to how one turns down the opacity metre on layers in a Krita/Photoshop document. After a sufficient enough insight into emptiness is acquired, so that this insight is sustained throughout daily life, the veracity factor (or ‘opacity’) can never return 100%.
It should be said that the insight into emptiness is not a binary insight. It comes in degrees and can be strong in some aspects of experience while lacking or weak in other areas of experience.
In this video, Roger describes what amodal perception is and how it relates to a trick the mind plays causing us to believe we phenomenologically experience a self, a centre and boundaries to the mind, and that we have a hard, weighty body. When in fact, we never directly perceive those things (not in the same way we may see a colour). Rather they are only heavily inferred by misattributing special relevance to certain somatic sensations and other percepts.
Once enough clear perceptual data is gathered the mind may heavily down weight or stop altogether those amodal perceptions (of self with agency, boundaries and centre to the mind, and hardness of a solid body). The result is one’s experience becomes incredibly airy, soft, more free-flowing and so much less contracted than the average mind. This equates to much, much less suffering, and much, much more enjoyment of being!
*Remember this is all phenomenology talk – this is not to say we don’t have physical bodies.*
Conversations
Shawn and Roger talk to Lauritz on his Concious Development Youtube channel about meditation experiences, psychedelics and models to map spiritual progress.
A discussion with Shawn and Roger on how the cognitive science theory of Predictive Processing may make sense of what is happening in meditation.
Social Practices
Coaching Examples
These videos are part of a 1-on-1 meditation, guidance session with Roger. The student agreed for the session to be recorded and uploaded to YouTube.
Community
Noah lays out a vision for how software, technology, and computer science can come together to make measuring first person experience more data driven and empirical. Along with the long term vision, he demos the current prototype code named “iAm”, which allows for reporting of perceptual experience in real time, along with a suite of analytic tools for generating visualizations of the data reported on.