Recommended Books

Mindfulness

• Mindfulness in Plain English by the monk Bhante Gunaratana.  Probably the most universally recommended book on general mindfulness.

Direct Pointing/Non-duality - These books may help provide a sense of what enlightenment is about, and the direction to lean into.

• I Am That by Nisargadatta.  Classic text of transcribed talks, this would probably be my desert island spiritual book.  Free audio of the text.
• The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts.  Thought provoking and relatively palatable even for a mainstream audience.
• Be As You Are: The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi by David Godman.  A classic, a compilation of many quotes arranged by topic.
• Gateless Gatecrashers by Ilona and Elena (also the free pdf version). Transcripts of conversations with seekers, containing some of the most direct pointing instructions available.  If you dare, even more raw and a bit rude at times is Brutal Beginnings (pdf).
  

About the characteristics of Enlightened Individuals and a little bit on how to get there.

• The Finders by Jeffery Martin.  This book presents extensive research into over 1000 people considered to be enlightened.  We can quibble with some of the assumptions, or about the morality of selling a Finders Course, but at present there is nothing else really like this.  There is a free ebook on the associated publication page that summarizes the findings along with general recommendations for practice. 

After Enlightenment

• The End of Your World by Adyashanti.  While this could be interesting even for seekers, this is probably most useful for those who have experienced a degree of awakening.

Other readings:

• What is Enlightenment, a collected series of posts by user iamquiet on reddit, from realization.org by way of archive.org.
• The Layers of Depth in Fundamental Wellbeing, many descriptions of various parts of the path from Jeffery Martin's work and the numerous participants in the Finders Course.
   

The Big Experience

It is somewhat common for people relatively early on the path to have a BIG experience.  It doesn't have to play out that way, but then again, a big initial awakening or opening is not exactly a rare event.  What's going on?  What is that about?

The experience referred to here often has some kind of taste of complete freedom or liberation, possibly great joy, love, light, energy, etc.  In the Buddhist/Theravada progress of insight, this falls under the heading of what I simply call the "pleasant" phase (or the more arcane traditional label of the stage of knowledge of arising and passing) and manifests in a range of anywhere from pleasant to ecstatic.  It may happen as a result of meditation, most commonly during massed practice on an early retreat of some kind, or from using a psychedelic, or from great personal trauma, loss, or exhaustion.  Extremely rare individuals have stumbled into it by simply reading a sentence that gives them great insight.

The experience may be so "big" that a person may think they are enlightened.  Indeed, they may have gotten a kind of glimpse.  But as pure as that experience can be, it would generally be somewhat tainted by being viewed from substantially within the assumptions they currently hold.  And in virtually every case, the person will contract back to something like their former identity and beliefs.

To my way of thinking a couple of things are going on here.  On the one hand, in order to have a big experience, you need to establish through human culture a thorough indoctrination into attachment to language, concepts, beliefs, cultural assumptions, and identity.  Check.  Pretty much all people fall into this category.  But in terms of "big" I'd say plausibly the more attachment the better.  My speculation is that it might even "help" if the person is particularly rigid about some of these things, solidly married to their worldview, even neurotic about it.  Not that you'd want to cultivate that.

The other side of the coin is that you then need a very complete relaxation of all these things.  You need to stumble into a very "pure" consciousness that has dropped as many of these attachments, assumptions, beliefs and rigidities as possible.  A complete letting go into pure consciousness, the metaphorical original mind or natural mind.  Complete freedom.  A thoroughly different point of view.

It is the gulf or contrast or difference between these two extremes that creates the ground for a big experience.  The more radical the change in perspective, the bigger the relief, and the more dramatic it will be perceived.  For some people who already "get it", it might not be as big, it might not ever happen that way.  This would be like someone who has been meditating a little bit over time and slowly gets it, kind of like the apocryphal metaphor of boiling a frog.  But for someone who is more thoroughly entranced by thought-addicted identity views, the bigger the experience might be.  And again, pretty much everyone is substantially "attached", even if they've read a whole stack of Buddhist books.

The blue line in the graph above attempts to portray the theoretical progress over time of a typical person on the path.  Slow at first, then perhaps a tipping point such as stream entry, and a resulting acceleration, and then a slowing down again as one asymptotically approaches some ideal.  Actual progress would be much noisier and different.

The graph explains why the big experience, from a meditation perspective, is generally only possible, or more likely, earlier on or in the acceleration phase, because the gulf that creates the ground for the experience is vast at first, but as progress is made, the chance of experiencing something that big or  dramatic falls away.  As one moves towards the liberated perspective and leaves the attached perspective behind, any jumps into a very pure version of freedom seem more and more inconsequential, more ordinary.  After a certain point, it cannot be perceived as big or dramatic, this is pretty much the way things are perceived all the time.

Although this kind of experience can be repeated, for a typical meditator it is also very common to have just one big experience, and this is commonly the biggest, most dramatic experience of a meditator's life.  On the other hand, it is possible to repeatedly release into a very absolute experience, and some may have more of a predisposition to this kind of thing than others.  Psychedelics do help to reach this kind of absolute, but even here some degree of meditative practice makes a big difference.

At any rate, the experience often provides the motivation to get serious about a meditation practice and continue on the path.

Jud Brewer's Apps

I have been following Jud Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, ever since he put some of my meditation teachers in an fMRI machine and measured their brain activity.

I eventually learned that he has recently created a number of apps for

• Anxiety - Unwinding Anxiety
• Eating - Eat Right Now
• Smoking - To Quit

A close friend began using the Unwinding Anxiety app and has gotten good results.  These are paid apps, but much of the material and process is covered in the first couple of months.  They introduce mindfulness as a part of understanding and becoming aware of the patterns involved in anxiety, overeating, and addiction.  The apps use daily videos combined with multiple random reminders a day to engage in a few seconds of mindfulness practice, in this case a basic form of noting.  They encourage a day by day, moment by moment approach that slowly builds - you can't jump ahead to future lessons.  Best of all, the apps have been refined with real world testing.

If you are dealing with some of the problems above, these apps could be helpful as well as being a painless way to start getting into mindfulness practice.

A Simple Way to Start

For someone starting out or just willing to experiment, this is a series of four really simple meditation styles that progressively add structure.  The idea is to experiment with each for maybe 1 to 10 sessions and see what works for you, and to monitor whether increasing amounts of structure help you to be more mindful.

1. Doing Nothing

This is an unstructured practice of continuously "letting go", as I describe in The Easy Way - Do Nothing.  The practice is to just be, letting go of whatever, if anything, is coming up, and if you can't let go of something, let that be okay as well.  And if you lose mindfulness and come back, just go right back into letting go.  The practice is to let go, and continue letting go.  In essence to just stop.  Stop doing and just be.  Just this, nothing to do but just be, and always come back to just being.

When you realize you're "doing" something - thinking, inclining towards thinking, grasping at something or resisting something, just kind of stop and let go of as much of it as you can.  No need to grasp at anything or seek something better than this moment, just let everything be as it is.  During formal meditation practice you've set things up so that for a period of time you have nothing to do.  So do that - just be.  Relax.

This has always been at the core of any good meditation practice, but in the past I thought of it as secondary to the need to maintain continuous awareness, and I taught the letting go part after some awareness was established, but I'm beginning to think maybe people need to hear this first, so that this is always in the background from the beginning.

I would consider this to be an advanced style in the sense that many people will be spacing out left and right with this technique, and many may not get to what I would consider a full letting go, but I think this is nonetheless a worthwhile experiment - to begin to get it into the core of one's being that this is a valuable direction to lean in.

I wouldn't endlessly practice this as a standalone unless you are maintaining relatively continuous mindfulness.  Typically one or more of the following structured practices would be good to work on with an eye towards mastering the practice, i.e. putting in enough high quality practice until it becomes second nature.

2. Breath Awareness

The standard practice of following the breath.  The main recommendation, the trick if you will, is to follow the sensate experiences of the breath, feeling the breath as opposed to thinking about the breath.  The breath is always present and is used as a kind of anchor - when one loses awareness and returns to mindfulness, then return to simply experiencing the breath.  Within the mindfulness of breath awareness practice, remember to continue to practice letting go, just being.

3. Breath Counting

Same as breath awareness plus now we introduce counting the out-breaths.  Continue to feel the breath, but now we count the out-breaths up to 10, and then start over at 1.  The breath counting gives us a little extra to do, using up a little bit of mental bandwidth that we might otherwise use to wander.  Counting can become relatively automatic, so ratcheting the count back to 1 gives us a way to avoid that automaticity, and provides some feedback if we notice the count is over 10 (or if we lose the count).  Again, within the mindfulness of breath counting practice, continue to practice letting go, just being.

4. Breath Counting with Mantra

Same as breath counting plus now we introduce a mantra on the in-breath.  A mantra can be any word or phrase, but I'm going to suggest "awareness" as a possible mantra.  Although any word could be used, I recommend targeted words that are designed for whatever you feel you need for that particular meditation session.  Words like maybe "peace", "love", "stillness", "relaxation", etc.  However I might recommend that you pick a mantra for a particular session and stick with it.  In other words, don't give yourself the wiggle room to change the mantra in that session as that may tend to add extra thoughts and doubts.  Again, within the mindfulness of breath counting with mantra practice, continue to practice letting go, just being.

In Practice

As you experiment with these 4 simple techniques, notice whether or not they help to keep you mindful.  What works?  What percentage of the time are you actually mindful, aware of your awareness in meditation?  And within that, are you continuously relaxing, letting go?

Even with a relatively high degree of this kind of structure, there is plenty of room to space out.  A reasonably fit, relaxed person completes a breath about once every six seconds.  Even with a mantra on the in-breath and counting on the out-breath, there are a couple of seconds to spare on each movement of the breath, which is an eternity in terms of the mind's inclination to immediately go off and wander.  Sometimes you can notice that desire to go off and think.  But the point is to commit to these continuous practices, continually interrupt your mind's tendency to space out, and keep giving the mind experiences of continuous relaxed mindfulness.

Spending some time mastering one or more of the three structured practices might be a good way to develop a strong base before trying the noting practice I recommend in the series How To Meditate.