“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.” - William Blake
Welcome to a special end-of-year post and meditation. The end of the year is a good time to work hard at creating new intentions for all the things we’re hoping to accomplish in the new year, so that we can become more happy and regulated and productive.
Ha ha! – Fuck that!
I’ve never liked New Year's intentions. We're not doing any of that.
This meditation is about giving up. It’s about abandoning whatever bogus resolutions you once failed at keeping, and instead coast on giddy disobedient relief.
Below is a cathartic piece I wrote on exactly this subject a few years ago, with some updates. At the time I was trying hard to write an impossible book on the so-called “deep end” of transformative meditation practice. The subject ended up being too unwieldy and subjective and paradoxical for my (dis)orderly brain, and ultimately sent me into a years-long mental health inferno.
So I gave up!
Best thing I ever did.
Life is hard and we need to be a fighter. AND, sometimes, giving up lets life give us the very thing we need. We just couldn’t see it on account of how hard we were trying to get some other thing we thought we needed.
Happy end of the year, my friends. I goddamn love this community and I love doing this Substack and let’s keep staying alive together.
Love, Jeff
PS - Just had a brainstorm! Is anyone in this community actually interested in all the consciousness-transforming no-self mystical spiritual weirdness mentioned below?
The focus of Home Base is on making meditation accessible. I love exploring how different meditative insights can be applied productively to different kinds of challenges, and for many that’s more than enough. But I also have an abiding interest in the subject of consciousness itself – its nature and limits and variations, and how orienting to those limits (or lack of limits) can radically alleviate human suffering. If any of that sounds interesting to you, please comment below, saying something like “Gimme the Weird Shit Jeff.” If there’s a lot of interest, Lilli and I will find a way of incorporating more of it into Home Base.
Happy New Year! We’re all gonna die! And it’s OK! Maybe!
Fuck It
I spent roughly ten years - from 2007 to 2017 – working on what I imagined would be the definitive book about the meditative mind.
The project emerged from my realization, around the time I finished my first book, The Head Trip, that a lot more was happening in the mind when we meditate than was generally spoken about: the thinning out of core aspects of the self, the falling away of basic drivers, new emerging sensitivities and intuitions (including seemingly paranormal ones), mental health breakdowns, dramatic energetic phenomena in the nervous system, very subject-specific kinds of creative breakthroughs, rapid cycling through different moods and mental states, periods of great intimacy and interconnection, expansions in space, contractions in fear, layers of conditioning exfoliated, increasing naturalness and ordinariness (for some), but also (for others), ineffable emptiness and variations of cosmic weirdness.
Human experience unfolds across a rich spectrum of possibility. Yet if you only read the newspapers and magazine articles and books of the intellectual mainstream, you’d never know any of it was happening at all. Any discussion of spirituality in that scene was an opportunity to deride New Age feeble-mindedness, or an excuse to start ranting about fundamentalism and the evils of organized religion. Snore.
I thought: we need to reclaim this stuff!
People need to know we’re allowed to talk about existential and spiritual experience, that this can be done in an clear and rigorous way. All that needed to be done, I thought (recalling this now with a slight edge of hysteria), all that needed to be done was to find a solid overarching metaphor for meditative transformation, and then I could just weave in practitioner anecdotes, at this point several hundred practitioner anecdotes, actually – they seemed to accumulate with every conversation, and every email exchange, and every new book, books numbering into the hundreds at this point, spilling out of my shelves (must buy more shelves) … but not a problem! Just weave ‘em in according to the dominant themes – yes, the themes of practice, that are also like terrains, or – better metaphor – seasons of practice.
And while I’m at it, why not also weave in the most important quotes and perspectives from the most articulate teachers I could interview – about a dozen at this point – and of course as a science writer I can’t forget the neuroscientists (my brother is a neuroscientist!), we absolutely need the scientific perspective here otherwise it’s all just subjective effusion, subjective effluvia (beautiful effluvia). So many interesting science papers to read – hundreds at this point (I keep them stacked in piles on my desk, up and up they go, like rising skyscrapers), on perceptual psychology and evolutionary theories of mind and dopamine and attention and the default mode network and chronobiology and … actually this is all starting to sound a bit materialist – I need a few philosophers in here too, they have much to say (especially philosophers of mind), but also the religious studies scholars, the historiographers, and the Buddhists too of course – although saying “The Buddhists” suggested there’s one Buddhism, when in fact there are many Buddhisms, all of which needed to be represented, to say nothing of what is beyond Buddhism, that is, the perspectives from other contemplative traditions.
If I was going to write anything comprehensive (for I feel a great responsibility to do this topic justice), all of this needed to be addressed! And of course one other very important piece to add: my OWN experience, what practice had revealed to ME, for ultimately this book is not about ideas – it’s about our own changing human experience of reality, which in my case seems to be made of, well, made of something … of bits, yes, bits! Bits doing things, doing things in space, bits sometimes falling into space, or maybe that’s emptiness, so really the metaphor begins with bits, bits exfoliating other bits, in terrains (different terrains – no, seasons!), but also in space (timeless empty space, space that is also – paradoxically – full), bits exfoliating the space in the terrain (season!) of timelessness (emptiness!), except I haven’t yet explained the layers, the layers of exfoliated conditioning that make up each seasonoidal bit, or perhaps –
FUCK IT.
Oh yes that feels good.
Fuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckitfuckit.
Fuck trying to get it “right.”
I leave you with a Zen parable:
The old master lay dying, surrounded by his closest monks. As he choked and rattled (for the end was nigh), a senior monk leaned over his teacher’s bed and asked if he had any final words of wisdom for the people.
The old master grew silent, his long face drawn into thought. Then, in a voice already fading, he said “Tell them … tell them the Truth is like a river.”
The senior monk relayed the words to the other monks, and there was a long respectful pause as they digested this message.
But then a younger monk, with the boldness and foolishness of youth, yelled out: “What do you mean the Truth is like a river?”
Quiet in the room.
The monks were silent.
The master was silent.
Outside, water from a standing pipe dripped and dripped.
The master replied: “Ok. Truth is not like a river.”
TAKE OUR SURVEY! PLEASE!
We are trying to get a bit clearer about how to support people’s meditation practice, and support the members of this awesome community. Plus we’re just plain curious about what you’re into! Please take a moment to complete this 1-minute survey about you and your interests - thank you.
CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLORER’S CLUB NEW YEAR’S RETREAT
January 3-5, 2025
Over Zoom, and in-person Sat only
60 Lowther Ave, Toronto (near St George Subway)
Join the Consciousness Explorers Club teaching team – including Jeff – as we start 2025 fresh at this New Year’s Meditation retreat.
The entire weekend will be offered over Zoom, with an opportunity to attend in-person on Saturday from 10am-5:30pm at Toronto’s Friends House (60 Lowther Ave, just north of St George Subway Station)
This weekend retreat is being offered on a “pay what you’re able to” model, with a wide sliding scale to accommodate all income ranges. The CEC is a registered not-for-profit with the mission of making meditation and personal growth practices fun and accessible to all.
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