Tag: Meditation

• August 25, 2014

  A review of Chapter One of Sam Harris, Waking Up: Preliminary questions

  I recently read Chapter One of Sam Harris’s forthcoming book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion and found myself thinking, ‘This may not end up being an excellent book, but for all that it is an important and prescient one.’ (You can read Chapter One here on his website.) Harris’s principal question, which goes unstated…
• November 12, 2013

  ‘Release the eyes…’

  Words that came to me during morning meditation moments before a philosophical conversation: * Release the eyes, the twitching wrists, the furled mouth. Free the neck and go timeless.
• November 11, 2013

  ‘Clean the palate before each new word…’

  Words that came out of a morning meditation moments before a philosophical conversation: * Clean the palate before each new word. In order to receive each word as new. But each word is new. So, keep the palate clean always.
• June 24, 2013

  The top of the inhalation… the bottom of the exhalation–

  The top of the inhalation is a fold, the bottom of the exhalation is a cut. The fold returns the breath to its downward course, the cut extinguishes it. The cut is the surprise of death, the cleanest mark of impermanence. The beginning of the inhalation is the first dawn, the very edge of the…
• April 29, 2013

  The rigor of meditation practice

  There is a rigor involved in meditating regularly that calls me back to meditate well before dawn in spite of the passing desire to stop or the urges to make an exception today. The rigor of a meditation practice emerges only for the one who, like the Pyrrhonian skeptic, would not live according to dogma.…