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Loch Kelly's effortless mindfulness and the attention/awareness split

7 tweets · August 2021 · 48 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter

Yoooo @m_ashcroft, Loch Kelly's book "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness" is an AT handbook disguised as dharma. It features many little "glimpse" exercises for accessing an expanded nondual awareness state. Here's the first one:

I think Loch Kelly's book will also be of interest to @SarahAMcManus, @QiaochuYuan, and other folks who've been inspired by @Meaningness and/or @_awbery_ to look into Dzogchen since his approach seems to be to Dzogchen & Mahamudra what Jon Kabat-Zinn was to Zen & vipassana

And of course, anything talking about attention as distinct from awareness is going to end up being profoundly relevant to the brain hemispheres!

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

1/ Reading Spectrum of Ecstasy (thanks @QiaochuYuan & @Meaningness!) ...and the parallels between it and Iain McGilchrist's @divided_brain model are... like 100%? If it weren't for the fact that IM doesn't use the term "non-dual", these pages could literally from IM's book.

McGilchrist's work gives an *intellectual* vantage point from which statements like "awareness is already enlightened" can seem obvious. This is WILD. (excerpt screenshot from Loch Kelly's book)

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

@meditationstuff @Timber_22 @noididntreadit Quote from Dzogchen book Roaring Silence that I like: > "Intellect itself needs to taste the manner in which it functions as a method of obscuring the nature of Mind." It captures a piece of the value I got from learning McGilchrist's hemisphere model: showed LH what it is.

However, there's still something weird that needs bridging between the broad notion of two hemispheres with radically different modes of perception (attention vs awareness) and thus radically different basic experiences of the world and self and self-in-world.

I and others have hand-waved around this by talking about the right vs left hemisphere being "in charge" or whatever, but whatever the hell that is doesn't show up as obvious lateralization on an fMRI! A study found big effects in the Default Mode Network (DMN) and TPN though!

So there's clearly some sort of mapping between {the left & right brain hemispheres} and {problem-solver mind & nondual awareness}. I don't know how to relate that to the DNM & TPN study. A hint: the hemispheres themselves are very intertwingled: not-two.

David Chapman @Meaningness ·

@micahtredding @meditationstuff @nosilverv @Morphenius @JakeOrthwein Specifically, in Dzogchen, the main things asserted to be non-dual are: duality and non-duality. That probably sounds like nonsense on first reading. It *can* be understood intellectually. Doing so may be useful. It’s easier to approach through meditation experience, however.