Meditation, whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, or Islamic, was invented as a way for the soul to venture inward, there ultimately to find a supreme identity with Godhead.

Change of state is not the point; recognizing the Changeless is the point, recognizing primordial Emptiness is the point, and if you are breathing and vaguely awake, that state of consciousness will do just fine.

Notice [in Quantum Questions] I was not saying that modern physics itself supports or proves a mystical worldview.  I was saying the physicists themselves were mystics, and not that their discipline was a mystical or somehow spiritual endeavor resulting in a religious worldview.  In other words, I disagreed entirely with books such as The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, which claimed that modern physics supported or even proved Eastern mysticism.  This is a colossal error.  Physics is a limited, finite, relative, and partial endeavor, dealing with a very limited aspect of reality.  It does not, for example, deal with biological, psychological, economic, literary, or historical truths; whereas mysticism deals with all of that, which the Whole.  To say physics proves mysticism is like saying the tale proves the dog.

We are part and parcel of a single and all-encompassing evolutionary current that is itself Spirit-in-action, the mode and manner of Spirit's creation, and thus is always going beyond what went before--that leaps, not crawls, to new plateaus of truth, only to leap again, dying and being reborn with each new quantum lurch, often stumbling and bruising its metaphyscical knees, yet always getting right back up and jumping yet again.

The Witness is a huge step forward, and it is a necessary and important step in meditation, but it is not ultimate.  When the Witness or the soul is finally undone, then the Witness dissolves into everything that is witnessed.  The subject/object duality collapses and there is only pure nondual awareness, which is very simple, very obvious.

Like a famous Zen Master said when he got his enlightenment, "When I heard the bell ring, suddenly there was no 'I' and no 'bell,' just the ringing."

Saint Teresa was a great contemplative?  Yes, and Saint Teresa is the only woman ever to have reformed an entire Catholic monastic tradition (think about it).  Gautama Buddha shook India to its foundations.  Rumi, Plotinus, Bodhidharma, Lady Tsogyal, Lau Tzu, Plato, the Baal Shem Tov--these men and women started revolutions in the gross realm that lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, something neither Marx nor Lenin nor Locke nor Jefferson can yet claim.  And they did not do so because they were dead from the neck down.  No, they were monumentally, gloriously, divinely big egos, plugged into a deeper psychic, which was plugged straight into God.

Environmental Impacts

    * Number of acres of U.S. forest which have been cleared to create cropland to produce a meat-centered diet: 260 million
    * How often an acre of U.S. trees disappears: Every 5 seconds
    * At present rate of deforestation, number of years before not a single tree will remain standing in the United States: 50
    * Amount of trees spared per year by each individual who switches to a pure vegetarian diet: 1 acre
    * Driving force behind the destruction of the tropical rainforests: American meat habit
    * Amount of meat imported annually by U.S. from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama: 200 million pounds
    * Amount of meat eaten by average person in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and Panama: Less than the average American housecat consumes
    * Current rate of species extinction due to destruction of tropical rainforests and related habitats: 1,000 species a year