Blog posts that have been integrated into the book Spiritual Awakening for Geeks, Volume 1: Cultivating Mindfulness and Insight through Meditation.
As I describe in my introductory article on insight, insight practice is the experiential exploration of the relationships between self, reality, awareness, and subjective experience. The result of insight practice is insight, which is both an understanding of those relationships and an ability to access modes of perception in which those relationships are evident. I (read more)
Visualizing a conceptual overlay on your nonconceptual subjective experiences can help you stay grounded in experience-focused perception. As I describe in my article Seven Stages of Spiritual Insight, the fourth stage of insight practice (inverting experience and reality) involves cultivating experience-focused perception. Visualizing our conceptual interpretations of experience can help us stay grounded in experience-focused (read more)
Learn to enter a state of experience-focused perception at will. As I describe in my article Seven Stages of Spiritual Insight, the fourth stage of insight practice (inverting experience and reality) involves cultivating a new way of perceiving phenomena: experience-focused perception. Alternating between concept-focused and experience-focused perception can be a helpful practice for distinguishing these (read more)
Look at something—for instance, a stone. Concentrate on the visual experience you’re having. Notice your sense that this experience corresponds to an actual, real stone. Use questions to investigate the relationship between the visual experience you’re having and the supposed reality of the stone; for instance, “What do I experience more directly: experience or reality? (read more)
Look at something. Concentrate on the visual experience you’re having. Notice your sense of being a witness of the experience, separate from the experience. As you concentrate on the experience, silently ask yourself, “What experiences this?” and start searching for a direct experience of the supposed witness. If you get distracted, start over. If you (read more)
