I sat a course recently——10 days, 11 hours of meditation a day, beginning with the 4:00 a.m. gong-strike. And the whole thing was carried out under a vow of silence, the “noble silence,” so that although you live amongst brothers and sisters, your fellow practitioners, you don’t speak nor make more than the briefest eye contact——which when it occurs accidentally feels akin to sin. The style of meditation we practiced is known as Vipassana, which comes from the Theravada tradition of Sri Lanka and Burma where allegedly the purest version of the Buddha’s original teachings were preserved in exile while the tradition was lost in its native Indian homeland. This tradition aims to focus the mind entirely on the sensations of the body. For 10 days straight, behind closed eyes, this is the mind’s one task: to scan the body from head to toe and toe back to head, observing carefully every possible sensation. Two things become apparent, (1) it’s impossible to do this for more than mere seconds before becoming distracted, and (2) upon working with this technique for a couple days, the mind discovers an ability to perceive sensations it never knew itself capable of. The resolution of one’s bodily self-perception is increased in proportion to the degree of concentration one can muster. By the end of my ten days, the self-scanning was going straight through the body like an MRI——I was able to feel the form of my intestines, the minute pulsations of the heart beyond the obvious beating, the texture of the lungs and the turbulence and temperature of the breath curling out of the nostrils. This was all incredible to me, for I am one who lives with little attention paid to his body. For the most part I’ve been simply a head walking around in this world, profoundly oblivious to things of this sort. That all being said, at some point the external world called to me again——beckoned me to know it once more. Though I found this technique interesting, I came to find it incapable of producing a transcendence of the ego due to this single-minded focus on one’s inner world. At the end of each day, I was still Peter trying to control a raucous mind, and this is no reason to sacrifice 10 days to any technique; it was simply an exercise in concentration, and I longed for transcendence. I longed to get beyond myself. I meditate to let the universe peer in through my head like one looks through a peephole on a motel door; as strange as that might sound to the uninitiated, I can attest that it is possible to give oneself up to the universe, to make oneself a vector for the universe to inhabit for at least the occasional precious moment. The times in which this has happened to me number among the greatest moments of my life, and their impact stretches far beyond the experiences themselves. Once one sees the world this way, however briefly, I am convinced they are forever changed for they have seen their own tiny life condense down to the scale it truly occupies: a droplet of dew amongst millions on the great spiderweb of life, glinting in the morning sun. To see oneself from the perspective of the universe is to see a truth we are normally blinded to by the obsessive ramblings of the ego. And if we can maintain this perspective, the value of our own life and that of the most distant stranger are equalized, as they should be, and so an ethical revelation is also to be had. Your own life becomes but an object amongst an infinite collection of similarly valuable objects. Mind fuses with universe——is brought back into the fold.

There is probably a time and place in which, or people for whom, Vipassana is the best medicine to cultivate a mindful life. I am certainly not one of those people, and I suspect that no true lovers of nature are either. To me Vipassana seems better suited to cave-dwelling gurus or city-dwelling urbanites who don’t particularly feel the need to cultivate a deep awareness of their surroundings. Vipassana is a process that a deep history of practice has affirmed——I have no doubt it has its rightful place on this Earth. But it tends to a specific, narrow gaze aspect of the mind, and purposefully limits itself to the boundaries of the individual’s body, and goes no further. For the nature lover, the boundaries of the body are where awe takes its start, from which point it spreads outwards to flood over the world and all its forms, stretching as far abroad as the starry night sky. To me, a true practice of meditation must draw no arbitrary boundaries, for the body is inseparable from the world it rests within. And the true nature lover, in turn, must also look inwards to the sensations of their organismal body, for this too is nature, and this body connects us to the life that surrounds. And so in short, the meditative practice I’ve settled upon is unbounded——one’s body, the sensations coming in from the world, and the thoughts within one’s mind must all be the objects of one’s attention if one is to be truly aware of the world, for the world is all of these things in one strange union. And so here is my practice for your benefit; may it be of use to the diligent student——the practitioner who seeks to give oneself up to the universe, and become both everything and nothing in the process. It takes time and practice; patience is critical. Although the name I’ve chosen for it is admittedly glib, nothing else suffices——and anyone who has experienced it will attest that it really is a cosmic awareness.

Steps to experiencing Cosmic Awareness:

1. Find a comfortable place to sit where hopefully no one will see you for an hour. Your concentration will be shattered, and your ego fully restored the moment someone finds you meditating. It’s human nature to be made self-conscious by the gaze of others, and self-consciousness is explicitly what we are setting out to eliminate. The place you choose can be indoors or outdoors. It’s good to practice in both locales since our lives are lived in both. That being said, doing this outdoors is a far different experience, and usually of a more spiritually charged sort. How long you meditate is up to you of course. For me, normally an hour suffices, but sometimes far longer is needed.
2. Begin with the eyes closed, and eliminate all expectation. Yes you’re in search of high places, but cosmic awareness cannot be willed. It is what accompanies the emptying of the mind, and it is like reintroducing the mind back to the raw material that it itself is crafted of, before it became plagued with concepts. An expectation of high places is itself a concept, and will therefore only obscure the vision of the real world that you seek.
3. Start by trying to pay attention only to the audio realm. This is your first task, and it is an artificial boundary that we are introducing only as a way to gradually approach the cosmic; it will be eliminated shortly as we expand outwards. Try and hear everything that is available to your ears——I promise that the deeper you look, the more you will find. The primary thing to notice at this point is that what you had been hearing before beginning this practice was only the most conspicuous sounds, the tip of the iceberg. There is a whole cacophony just waiting to be heard that you had previously ignored because your mind was only attuned to the lowest resolution necessary. My favorite example of this is the sound of the ocean. For those who are able, I recommend having one of your first sessions at its shore; you will initially be under the belief that the sound of each crashing wave is but a single muffled crash. Further examination will reveal much finer texture——infinitely finer texture…listen! The physical texture of the shore itself is revealed in the audio texture of the sound of each crashing wave, and when the full attention is geared towards this specific task, more and more of that detail is made available: you can actually come to hear a single wave crashing in 5 or 10 or 15 different places near you, upon different points along the sandbar or the shore. Each boulder or mound of sand becomes its own drummer in the symphony of sound. And are you just now noticing that incredible simmering sound that each wave makes as it is sucked back out to the sea after crashing? You have had perhaps many afternoons in front of the waves, and you are only now for the first time seeing how highly textured this experience truly is, and so far we are still only talking about the effect that it has upon the eardrums. There is so much more yet to be had.
4. You will notice almost instantly that thoughts intrude and prevent your attention from staying focused upon the world of sound. Allow no frustration to build; the thoughts should be seen as simply sensations themselves, much like the sounds reaching your ears. They will rise, linger, and then fade away and there is no way to control them. The experienced meditator does not ever come to be truly free of thoughts: he/she is simply no longer hijacked by thoughts when they do arise. Thoughts lose their power to corrupt the mind; they become but interesting phenomena for one to observe but not be controlled by.
5. Once you feel that you have done the audio realm justice, open your eyes. This is really an arbitrary distinction to make because one can never fully hold in mind all of the sounds within earshot to the full extent of their true complexity, so you’ll never really do it justice. The purpose is simply to pay attention to far more than you ever have before, and experience how rich the world of sound can really be when attended to deeply; I usually only devote the first five or ten minutes of a session to this closed-eye “deep listening.” Once you open your eyes, allow the attention to flood outwards over the land. Don’t try and constrain the attention to any given object, let the eyes wander wherever they naturally go. But with all this new sensory stimulation coming into the picture, don’t lose sight of the audio realm. Though sights and sounds enter our mind’s eye through two discrete organs, they stem from the same place. As we focus on the phenomena coming from both these senses at the same time, we are joining these two threads back together, in an attempt to see the world as it is.
6. Next, incorporate the sensations of the body. Whatever sensations arise, be they wind upon the skin, pain or numbness coming from the knees, or the heat of the sun upon one’s back, simply notice them as they come and go, as you’ve now done with sounds and sights. Feel the breath rise and fall. You may notice that from the mind’s perspective there is no real distinction to draw between inside the body and outside. The sensations from “inside” can feel as foreign to the mind as the sensations that come from “outside.” And as the mind feels the wind on the skin and the ground pressing up against the folded legs, it knows itself to be fully embedded within this world. The mind is but a node in a great network, and our task is to perceive the myriad vibrations surging throughout it. Same as the step before, as we add this layer to the practice we are not to let those that came before slip from our attention’s grasp. This is a cumulative process, not a substitutional one.
7. Finally, bring the sense of smell and even the sense of taste into the picture. The sense of smell can bring richly rewarding insights into one’s experience of a place, especially if they are outdoors. The sense of taste is the subtlest of the body’s senses while meditating, but even here there is something to observe.
8. Doing all of this simultaneously is the practice. I know it feels impossible at first, but with practice moments will arise in which the mind truly does feel like simply the point in space where all of these sense pathways and thoughts and emotions collide and intertwine and then pass away again, allowing the next moments in the stream of life to take their place. Moments will arise where the mind feels like a hoop through which a rivulet of life pours forth endlessly. These are the moments you’re practicing for, as they are the gateway to cosmic awareness. There will come a time, during one of these moments, where something vital shatters. That something is your mind’s conceptualizing of its own circumstance. The cosmic awareness is barred from arising as long as the mind is still saying to itself: “look at me——I’m but a hoop through which a rivulet of life pours forth endlessly.” This is the last thing that must be transcended, the final thing grounding you to yourself, the last vital sign that the ego still lives.

And so you’re sitting there in the grass, beneath the tree, at the shore of the ocean, and your mind is becoming more like the place itself and less like a mind riddled with thoughts. And since your thoughts are not constantly taking over your entire attention, more of your mind is devoted to perceiving it in its entirety than perhaps ever before. You are sitting in a world bristling with detail and intricacy. You are developing a transparency of sorts. And all of this is so that, in some bright moment, only the place itself is to be found where a rather bugged and bothered mind once was. It is an act of disappearance—of self-sacrifice. It is becoming both nothing and everything. It is as if the mind plugged itself into the world, and became only a passive conduit for the world of sensation to simply continue unheeded, as it would have even without you there. But now, all of that sensation is being held within, observed by, a conscious mind, instead of simply dissipating back into nothingness as it would have without a person there. The world is seeing itself through the miracle of human consciousness, correctly attuned. The profundity of one of these moments cannot be overstated. It does feel like the universe has become self-aware at this one point in time and space——a whole universe, resting upon a pair of shoulders, peering down at a sandy pair of jeans covering crossed legs. And all of it crumbles quickly once you have the thought that you’ve been successful.