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05 Jun 2023
Video Overview
Creators: 
Contemplative Sciences Center

Tibetan “Great Perfection” (Dzokchen) practices involve the deliberate elicitation of effortless self-emergent visionary experiences through gazing at the sun, a cloudless sky, or complete darkness while applying specific postures, gazes, attentional modalities, focus, breathwork, and at times visualizations to stimulate and influence dynamic and autonomous visions of buddhas. Visions are endogenously generated, meaning that they are amalgamations of past experiences and the architecture of the brain. Thus, self-emergent visions could be interpreted as externalized manifestations of the self, further contributing to the expanding representation of selfhood. The practice has implications for understanding conscious experience as constructed through perceptual predictions interacting with sensory data, suggesting that much of the world we experience is from inside rather than outside.