Mind & Contemplative Practice

Of all the traditions, I most closely follow Zen — its directness, its distrust of conceptual overlay, its insistence that practice and understanding are the same thing. But the inquiry doesn't stop at any single tradition. The contemplative traditions converge on a set of questions that no single lineage owns: What is the nature of attention? What is the self that seems to be paying it? What becomes possible when the ordinary mental noise quiets?

This page is organized around three clusters that have shaped my thinking and practice over five decades. They overlap — deliberately.

The Zen Thread

Zen is the tradition I practice and the one I return to. Its genius is that it refuses to let the map become the territory. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. Whatever you think enlightenment is, it isn't that.

Mind Training Broadly

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition developed what it calls lojong — mind training — with a precision that other traditions often lack. Fifty-nine slogans for working with attention, reactivity, and the habits of mind that generate suffering. The FPMT course in Bodhgaya was in this tradition. Sitting in Bodhgaya — the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment, under a descendant of the original Bodhi tree — and learning to sit quietly was not incidental.

The secular scientific tradition has since confirmed much of what contemplatives discovered experientially. This is worth knowing, though the confirmation is not the point.

The Mystical & Perennial Thread

William James was the first serious Western thinker to treat mystical experience as data rather than pathology. His taxonomy — ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity — still holds. He's dense and dated in places, but Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is the foundation everything else in this section builds on.

Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy makes the case that the mystical core of every major tradition points at the same thing — that beneath the doctrinal differences, the experiential reports converge. This is a controversial claim, but an important one to sit with.

Arthur Deikman is the figure I find most useful at the intersection of contemplative practice and cognitive science. His concept of the observing self — the awareness that witnesses thought without being thought — maps directly onto what meditation practice reveals. His work on foreground and background attention, and on how automatization limits perception, is as relevant to epistemology as it is to practice. I've found him essential.