The Map: Realms
The Realms of Everyday Enlightenment are a conceptual way to organize the Landmarks by their complexity and difficulty. Landmarks each have a Realm they are assigned to, which makes it easy to group them and think about how to progress. As you move from one Realm to the next, you will discover a deeper richness to your meditative practices, and will find greater peach and clarity. Take a look at each of the Landmarks below, and see which sound interesting and achievable. Once you've identified a Landmark, read through it and then see which Trails, Guides or Lenses include that Landmark, and explore those links as well.
Landmarks of Enrollment
- Acknowledge Negative Emotions Without Judgment is where you'll discover how often we pass judgement on what goes on around us. The example chosen is driving or commuting, but you can choose anything about your typical day that may be frustrating or boring, or mildly unpleasant in some way. Learning about judgement is the first step in learning about Non-Judgement.
- Experimenting with Cravings tests your experiences with cravings and how they affect your thoughts and emotions.
- Have Experimented with Witnessing asks whether you are able to experience basic Witnessing during simple tasks.
- Impermanence Basic Understanding asks whether you are aware of the impermanence of all things at all times, that they are changing, decaying, and will not last.
- Learn About Non-Aversion is where you will practice both experiencing and being patient with aversive sensations.
- Notice Multiple Sensations starts out with simple Mindful practices of using smell, taste, and touch to Experience the Now.
- Notice Your Wandering Mind asks whether you can notice when your mind tends to wander off in different directions.
- Observe Duality and Connectedness gives you a chance to see Duality and then try to use the Lens of Nonduality to see things in a different way.
- Observe Emotions From Outside you will see negative emotions as something to observe, not something that is You.
- Observe Impermanent People is a chance to experiment with the idea that there is no permanent, unchanging self.
- Observe Parts of a Whole is a first step in seeing some common things as parts of a whole.
- Observe Your Judgment and Non-Judgment is where you will learn about how to simply observe experience and thoughts. Observation is a necessary part of being Non-Judgmental, as it is a neutral way of experiencing things. Additionally, before we can learn more about the thoughts in our mind, we first must learn to Observe them.
- Simple Mindfulness While Walking is a good place to start practicing Mindfulness throughout your day. You should be able to be mindful anytime at all, and working on micro-meditative practices can be done in many different ways and places.
- Use Sounds to be Present asks about your ability to notice how listening to sounds can quickly bring your wandering mind back to your present experience.
Landmarks of Engagement
- Experiment with Mindfulness and Television invites you to experience Mindfulness in another way to discover that Experience the Now is more complicated than just recognizing sights and sounds, it also means paying attention to your own mind, and in this case particularly how your own mind is perceiving and reacting to The Now.
- Explore Presence While Walking shows some perceptions shifts that provide deeper understanding of how to Experience the Now, especially relating to how the present moment is the only moment that ever exists in consciousness.
- Extended Witnessing asks whether you are able to experience a form of Witnessing for longer periods of time.
- Listen to Someone Mindfully is a wonderful practice where you fully devote all your attention to another person. The main points are to give the other person all the time they need to say what they want to say, and to pay attention fully to that person and what they say. This practice is related to Mindfulness and Other-Centeredness, but the end result is an increase in Interconnectedness.
- Perceiving Parts as a Whole is a chance to perceive how a lot of things we see everyday can be grouped together naturally to form nearly arbitrary "wholes".
- Try Headlessness While Walking is a chance to practice Headlessness by simply opening up your perception to the entire world, and filling your entire consciousness with your visual field. The intended result is a mind clear of all thoughts, and an openness and vastness that comes from experiencing everything you see as it is in this moment. The Headless Way is mostly tied to the Beacon of Association, but these concepts are part of practices more related to the Beacon of Attention because as we allow our consciousness to fill with what we see around us, we become more fully present and have a new way to Experience the Now.
- Try Mindfully Watching Television shows how you can treat Television as another object for your Mindfully Attention. Simply sit back, enjoy your TV show, but apply some Mindfulness to that time.
- Try Out Other-Centeredness is a chance to try something in two different situations, once with someone you are talking to directly, and once with a person in the distance. For this first exercise you're trying to switch perspectives and see what another person might see.