Playing with Perception: Radical understandings of meditation and reality

Have you ever had the feeling that there’s more to the world than meets the eye? That things aren’t quite what they seem? That something fishy is going on?

Psychedelics can alter our perception of reality in sublime and terrifying ways. But how much of that is real? And are the experiences that we have when we’re tripping more real or less real than the world that we perceive in everyday life?

The Buddha had a lot of insight into this. He spent his whole adult life exploring and teaching about perception and the nature of reality. He discovered that something fishy absolutely was going on, and that the world wasn’t at all what it seemed. He said finally that if you understood perception, you understood everything, and he taught his followers how they could train their hearts and minds to perceive markedly different realities and exquisitely beautiful worlds. In fact, we could understand meditation simply as the art of learning to play with perception.

In this session Mark will talk about these ideas in some depth, and through a little guided practice will also hope to give people a small experiential glimpse of what’s possible. He will demonstrate how, through practising different ways of looking in meditation, we can learn to perceive the world in ways that drain the suffering out of life, whilst at the same time amplifying the sense of beauty and sacredness in our experience. 

Mark Ovland

Mark’s adult life has also been dedicated to this exploration of perception. He lived for a number of years in monasteries and retreat centres around India and in the UK, and has spent a further two years on intensive silent retreat. He was a close student of meditation master Rob Burbea and was blessed to have lived with and assisted Rob during the last years of his life, whilst Rob trained him to teach. Mark professes only a tiny fraction of his teacher's insight but is happy to pass on the little that he's picked up.


 

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