The Pop-noting Protocol
In a world where everyone is connected, there isn’t enough connection. You can ride your Facebook feed all day long and still go to bed feeling lonely and isolated. Even in-the-flesh face time with friends and family can leave us wanting, each of us caught up in our own internal drama, talking at each other about our stories, never truly sharing our experience or feeling completely understood. We need a way to feel more connected.
Social noting offers a window into another human’s moment-by-moment experience, sharing and receiving in a profoundly intimate but non-threatening way. Social noting builds on an ancient Buddhist mindfulness (satipatthana) technique, making it interactive. Two (or more) people can call out their experience together, back and forth, ping pong style (or around a circle), using simple, one-word labels for experience as it arises. “Seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, thinking, fear, joy, loneliness, love, anger, connection, itching, tingling, burning, pressure, lightness, heaviness, anxiety, hope”… all of these experiences can be shared with another human being as they occur, two people becoming one, simultaneously witnessing and normalizing each others’ experience. Social noting is the closest thing we have to Mr. Spock’s Vulcan mind meld from the original Star Trek television show. But social noting doesn’t feel kooky or even invasive; it just feels great.
Read MoreWhat is the Three Speed Transmission?
[2/27/13 11:07:29 AM] Nadav Spiegelman: we’re introducing the concept of the 3 speed transmission. What it is, how it came about, how it’s used.
Kenneth Folk: OK, let’s talk about how it came up in the first place.
After my first spiritual opening in 1982, I read a bunch of Zen books about how enlightenment is some nebulous wisdom that zen masters have. It was never clear to me how I could duplicate that in my own life. “Nowhere to go, nothing to get.” That sort of thing. This is surprisingly disempowering to a westerner who does not have access to traditional Chinese/Japanese culture and who grew up with the understanding that if you want to learn something, you go through a fairly straightforward process of education.
So, I didn’t know where to go with that other than to read books about Zen and sit for 30 minutes a day counting my breath 1-10. I could feel progress in my meditation practice throughout this time, but I had the distinct feeling that I was missing something and that my practice was remarkably inefficient. I never felt called to put on a black robe and join a Zen center, so I was on my own.
Read MoreDevelopmental Window for Contemplative Fitness brainstorm
Kenneth talks with Nadav Spiegelman about the “developmental window.” Recorded on 26January2013. Developmental Window for Contemplative Fitness brainstorm 26JAN2013
Read MoreEnlightenment for the Rest of Us: The Buddhist Geeks Conference
Drawing from Buddhism, neuroscience, and personal experience, Kenneth explains that enlightenment is a natural aspect of human development that is available to everyone.
Join us this year for the Buddhist Geeks Conference, August 9th – 11th, 2012 in Boulder, Colorado. Keynote addresses by Lama Surya Das, Stephen Batchelor, & more!
Click here for more information and to register: bgeeks12.com
Read MoreThe Simile of the Hard Drive: Vertical and Horizontal Development
One way to model spiritual development is by comparing it to a computer hard drive. A hard drive is a device for storing information in a digital magnetic format. The first hard drive was introduced by IBM in 1956. It was as big as a washing machine. Since then, hard drives have gotten much smaller, but still use the same basic design: a spinning platter that contains information and a moving head that reads and writes information to the disk. Think of a record player.
Read MoreMahamudra and the Joy of Failure
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (48.4MB)
Kenneth guides a student to the happiness that does not depend on conditions. Embracing failure as the ideal condition for progress. (Guided meditation. Mostly audio only, with some video toward the beginning of the talk.)
Read MoreJournalistic self-enquiry: The who, what, when, where, why, and how of selfing
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:04 — 24.8MB)
“This is something you can do at any level of development; beginning, intermediate, and advanced yogis can do this. You can see for a moment that there is nobody home… and you can get this whiff of peace. And if you do it more… you get better at it.”
“And it gets to the point where you really can’t sustain the misperception any more. It’s just clear, all the time: ‘Where am I? Nowhere. Who am I? No one. What makes me think this is me? Nothing makes me think this. When am I? I’m not. Why do I think this is me and that is not me? I don’t think that.’”
“The apparent “I” is a misperception that can be cured.”
-an excerpt from the talk
Read MoreNYC Talk: Realization and Development
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:09 — 20.3MB)
How awakeness in this moment is related to enlighenment over the long term.
Read MoreNYC Talk: Outcomes
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:50 — 26.4MB)
In this episode, Kenneth talks about how the outcome of your spiritual practice is influenced by the values you take into it. Also: pachekka buddhas, Actual Freedom, and the Dharma Overground; the ten oxherding pictures, Rumi, the Five Ranks of Tozan, and the man himself, Gotama Buddha.
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