Awaken to your true self, and step into the light of higher consciousness. Evidence-based inquiry sharpens the intellect and gives rise to wisdom. Mindfulness meditation, yoga, and the science of the inner worlds transforms consciousness and uncovers your true self.
- Be sure to see my new guide for beginners, How To Meditate.
- To read more about the Science of Meditation, click here.
- If you like my approach, book a coaching call with me for personalized instruction. There is no replacement for an excellent teacher. I have over a decade of experience teaching meditation, yoga, math, and science to students of all ages and skill levels.
If done properly, spiritual practice transform your ordinary experience in truly extraordinary ways – with the promise of real change and a sense of peace. If done incorrectly, you can waste hours, months, and even years. Sacred Science aims to work smarter, not harder, so spiritual development doesn’t have to take decades.
Dharma + Modern Science
Book a call now and see how your life can change in just 30 minutes. You’re just a couple of steps away from real transformation.
Meditation and Personal Growth
The way is in the heart, not in the sky
Gautama Siddharta (The Buddha)
The Buddhist philosophy says we suffer because we do not know ourselves. Because we do not understand the workings of the mind and the world, our mind remains reactive and anxious and we continually make poor judgements, and become fettered by addiction and craving. As long as we do not understand ourselves, we remain trapped, shackled by our own bad habits, entombed by our own self-defeating worldview.
Understanding these aspects of suffering that keep us chained to our mental agony is a key component in any serious meditative practice – when understanding ripens it is called insight, vipassana. Both philosophical and experiential understanding – in other words not just mere mental activity, but practice and embodiment of the principles in actual life – are required to overcome one’s own suffering and/or help another overcome theirs.
Meditation practices can offer us a way out of this mental suffering: by training the mind, its habitual anxious reactivity is soothed and a calm abiding happiness emerges.
Read more about Meditation and Personal Growth.
Yoga and Liberation
The Indian tradition of yoga is held in a similar position as Buddhism, to those who practice it. considering the scope of yoga to extend far beyond mere physical exercise or breathing practice, the path of yoga is a complete lifestyle designed to bring about the proper conditions to have these deep insights promised by Buddhists and Yogis alike. Instead of thinking of yoga as merely a weekly exercise class, the full path of yoga includes eight branches which form a wholistic path towards purification of consciousness as well as strengthening the physical body. Pantanjali comments, in the second line of the Yoga Sutras:
“Yogash chitta virtti nirodhah“
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
yogash/yoga/union – chitta/mind/consciousness – vritti/whirlpool/turnings – nirodhah/cessation/extinction
we become whole by stopping how the mind turns (trans. Roach & McNally)
yoga is the cessation of the whirlpools of the mind (trans. E. Bryant)
The aims as stated in many brands of eastern tradition tends to interface well with the mental-health paradigm of modern psychology. Indeed most of psychology is intended to bring about the end of human misery at least, if not the end of all suffering. In this way we can think of meditation and other contemplative techniques as methods to understand the mind’s reactive nature, and gain some control of the otherwise stormy sea of our emotional-physical life. We practice stilling our minds from the orientation that doing this will lead to decreased reactivity-stress in our mental continuum. When the reactivity-stress is subdued, a peaceful, highly alert and focused state unfolds; this state is moksha or liberation.
Tao Te Ching may give us another hint, in aphorism thirty-seven:
Without form there is no desire.
Tao Te Ching
Without desire there is tranquility.
And in this way all things would be at peace.
I like to think of yoga as an extension of meditation practice, yoga is a moving meditation. In my experience it is more difficult to stay focused while moving than it is while sitting still, so maintaining a concentrated state while practicing yoga adds a whole new level of difficulty to the program.
Slowly build up your physical and mental strength together with an integral yoga practice. I highly recommend the “Yoga Mat Companion: Anatomy” series, available on amazon.
Book a call with Daniel to find out more about yoga, meditation, and how to alleviate suffering through contemplative practices.
C.G. Jung and the Shadow
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who lived in the 20th century. Jung was trained as a doctor in Basel and was an active clinical psychologist for decades, but his most important works seem to transcend the categories of strict medical or psychological science. Deeply interested in mythology, stories, alchemy, and Gnosticism – Jung’s brand of psychology definitely has as spiritual or religious edge to it, which makes his ideas hard to swallow for some people.
I think Jung’s most important idea is the notion of the Shadow, the dark side, the negative aspect that compliments the conscious ego-personality. The shadow is an aggregate of all the negative aspects of your personality that you haven’t yet acknowledged, or that you don’t even want to admit to yourself. In Aion, Jung says of the shadow:
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real.
C.G. Jung – Aion, Ch. 2
Here’s how the shadow works at its most basic level. Things you’ve said to other people that hurt them, times you weren’t your best self, thoughts about the world that are really dirty and nasty; these are parts of the shadow. You don’t like to think of yourself as hateful, your image of yourself is narcissistic and self-righteous; so the things you don’t like about yourself are suppressed, denied, pushed down. The people that you hate the most, the parts of reality that just irk you to no end; these are all contents of the shadow. Until you face these subterranean grottos of the soul, they will torment you and torture you and those around you to the ends of the Earth.
Levels of Adult Development
Spiral Dynamics ties together the threads of the lowest to the highest forms of conscious behavior, weaving a story that connects all humans in a single fabric.
An integral-age conception, stages of adult development offers us a broad systems view of human potential and development. Weaving together child cognitive-developmental models of Piaget with adult moral stages of Kohlberg, Spiral Dynamics and other adult development theories offers us a spectrum of consciousness to study at each of its various levels. According to Don Beck, and Chris Cohen, the authors of Spiral Dynamics and the formulators of the theory, human moral development occurs in discreet stages that unfold in a somewhat predictable fashion. In human development, each level represents a landmark event noted by a shift in values or personal identity. As you moves through the stages of moral development, you begin to dis-engage with old belief systems and limiting personal identities, and adopt new more adaptive belief systems and self-identifications.
Using the “transcend and include” model, emphasis is on the preservation and extension of previous cognitive structures in each new developmental level. If you’re familiar with the three brain concept – the reptile brain, the mammalian brain, and the human cortex, all preserved together and stacked – then you’re familiar with a transcend and include model. Spiral Dynamics propose that levels of moral development always include previous levels; that is, as you develop as a moral agent you become capable of taking in more points of view. As you developed from a neonatal ignorance – completely unaware of the world and dependent on you mother – to a high-performing member in a global society, certain obstacles catalyzed your growth to a higher state of being. You overcame each of these obstacles and now your psyche is at such a high state of development that you can do things like think abstractly, do arithmetic, plan for the future, and estimate difficult-to-compute probabilities.
Exactly what is meant by “level of development” or “higher state of being” isn’t clearly defined, which is one drawback of the theory. You kind of have to be on board already with the notion that humans can develop and/or strive towards higher states of being. On the other hand, these levels of development appear to emerge spontaneously from multi-factor analysis of specially conducted interviews. While it is possible that the finding is merely a language game or statistical error, it’s more likely that the self-reported data accurately reflects how people feel and what they value: the categories or levels themselves tend to emerge from the data itself.
Read more about Spiral Dynamics here.
Dharma + Modern Science
Book a call now and see how your life can change in just 30 minutes. You’re just a couple of steps away from real transformation.
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