Total Meditation: The definitive book on meditation for stress-free living from the bestselling author and expert

The ultimate State of being

tolles hörbuch, leider nur englisch

My expectations of this book were that I, a Westener with some years of experience in the basics of meditation, mindfulness and awareness practice, would get some new perspectives to deepen my practice. Unfortunately, I didn‘t learn anything new from this book.There are very few basic awareness practices described in the book, e.g. about noticing how something looks, sounds, or feels like. Those are good, solid practices, but more suited for complete beginners, I think.This book is not about meditation. Instead it is rather about awareness and the belief that this awake state is always available.The author sometimes lists beliefs / behaviours / thoughts that he would describe as awake / conscious and those he describes as asleep / unconscious. Being introverted, almost all of the items marked as the desired awake state come naturally to me (e.g. thinking before I speak). But I‘m pretty sure that I‘m not fully awake / enlightened. Thus, I believe there‘s something missing.I found it very, very difficult to actually finish this book. One reason is that I thought the author stays very abstract with the whole topic he wants to convey and the examples he gives. The other reason is that the author keeps mentioning rather random topics throughout the book and usually claims that physicians / scientists / people in general had absolutely no clue how the topics work. Those topics include brain chemistry, behaviour of humans and other animals, or general physics, just to name a few. For some topics I believe that the claims of nobody knowing how they work are definitely wrong (e.g. If you want to know how an infant‘s brain learns to make sense of the world, I can highly recommend the book „Surfing Uncertainty“. Or simply reading the German wikipedia article about vitamin C will clarify that humans are not the only mammals who can‘t produce that vitamin themselves.), for most of them I‘m relatively certain that scientists have full, good, or at least some understanding about how they work, and about very few topics the author mentioned I don‘t have enough knowledge but would be very surprised if scientists didn‘t know anything at all about them. I don‘t think that most of such topics are relevant in any way for the book. That‘s why I kept being confused why the author would bring them up. But I did notice early on how believing that many of the author‘s claims are not true caused me to react with some aversion, which made reading on even harder.