The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works

Personally, I like to slice up the pie of sensory experience slightly differently. I separate body experience into physical-type body sensations and emotional-type body sensations. For simplicity, I include the chemical senses, smell and taste, into the category of physical-type body sensations. I separate mental experience into a visual component

interesting toward the end of my sit. My breath would slow down spontaneously, my body would relax despite the pain, and—miracle of miracles—the voice in my head would stop frantically screaming. It was still there, but more like an undercurrent, a whisper.

you can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.

The basic mantra of mindfulness is simple: trackable implies tractable.

A central notion of Buddhism is that there’s not a thing inside us called a self. One way to express that is to say that we are a colony of sub-personalities and each of those sub-personalities is in fact not a noun but a verb—a doing. One of my doings is Shinzen the researcher.

Impermanence is also related to what is called the Holy Spirit in the Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The phrase “Holy Spirit” may sound sort of mystical-shmystical, maybe even annoying, or intimidating, or off-putting. But the English words “Holy Spirit” come from the Latin spiritus sanctus, which in turn is just a translati

Forty-five years ago, I was studying languages and philosophy in graduate school, and I had never done any meditation practice. If somebody had said to me, “Several decades from now, you will be stating in print that the Judeo-Christian concept of the Holy Spirit, the martial arts concept of qi, and the Buddhist concept of anicca are related,” I pr

At first, meditation requires a lot of effort. You have to think about what you’re doing, and you can only get in a meditative state while sitting still, perhaps with your eyes closed. But at some point, the skill becomes second nature. You can attend to the business of life and still be in a meditative state just like you can listen to the radio w

So meditation gives us the ability to be less bothered when we experience physical or emotional pain and more fulfilled when we experience physical or emotional pleasure.