"Far out" meditation
In this short companion piece to her longer Dhamma talk, Brooke Brodack distills her most powerful meditation insight into a focused reflection. She traces the 1960s hippie expression "far out" back to what she believes is its true origin: the experience of deep meditation where consciousness expands beyond the body.
Brooke describes how most meditators stay at the surface level -- feeling breath on the upper lip, seeing blackness behind closed eyes -- but when you truly drop into a calm and centered place, something remarkable happens. You move beyond yourself, beyond your fears, into what Vipassana practitioners call the field of panya. For Brooke, this feels like a form of samadhi where she can actually sense her being growing larger, a powerful sensation that arrives suddenly and connects her to all that is.
Key Topics
- The "far out" meditation experience as consciousness expansion
- Vipassana meditation and the field of panya
- The difference between surface-level and deep meditative states
- Samadhi and the sensation of expanded awareness
Notable Moments
- [0:00] "This is where the term back in the 60s came from when the hippies used to say 'Far out!'"
- [0:44] Describes the shift from normal awareness to expanded consciousness
- [1:04] References the Vipassana "field of panya" -- a realm outside of yourself
- [1:13] "It's almost like a form of samadhi. I can actually feel my being larger."