Niels Viggo Hansen, nv@nielsviggo.net  
 

 
Meditation is being present in things as they are. Totally. Without wasting energy in holding on to anything, resisting anything, getting a particular experience, etc. But also without falling asleep.

The easiest thing one can imagine and, at the same time, one of the most difficult. How can you add or do something in order to stop all the adding and doing in life? How can you hold on to letting go, end even be wide awake in doing so?

But you can. Firstly, you can learn techniques which go some of the way with you. Secondly you can "fall in there" spontaneously. Finally, it is contageous so that you can catch it from persons and groups in whom it is strongly present. It is best to have all of these ingredients together.

I have known since early childhood that meditation is important for me, so I have practiced in many ways for many years. I have taught meditation too, in some periods. So by now I have many friends and connections who have something to do with meditation.

This page contains a list with hyperlinks to groups and friends with whom I have that kind of connection. It does not in any way pretend to be a complete or balanced list of meditative links, it is just the connections which have become particularly important for me.

There are great differences between the people and enterprises I link to. But when I step back and look at them, I think there is something they have something in common, compared to many other meditating groups and people. None of them have any great emphasis on imagery, narratives, dreams, transcendence, other realities, etc. - their flavour of spirituality is more unsentimental, direct and immanent.

By the way, I am also keen on connecting meditation and philosophy - as it happens in some of the great Buddhist schools. Not that meditation can by any means be reduced to philosophy - perhaps rather that true philosophy and true meditation have one function in common: they make abstraction and construction processes transparent. In a strongly abstracting and constructing form of life, this function is extremely important - it is our chance of owning our abstractions and constructions rather than be owned by them.

Michael Barnett and Wild Goose Company 
Zen and disco. If I have ever had anything like the classic master-disciple relationship to any of my many teachers, it is to this uncompromising englishman. Once I was very close to him for quite a while, and spiritually I think I still am. Michael shows very direct ways into meditation, not as an introvert process but dynamically, right in the intense flow where our inside and outside are constructed all the time. Particularly in the body. Michael's "Body Flow" is probably the most innovative technique of meditation I have ever encountered.

Mindfulness
A new and extremely clear articulation of the deep and simple meditative practice at the root of the entire Buddhist world. Antonia Sumbundhu and Karuna Workshops are fine Danish representatives.

Gomde
Tibetan buddhism (the Nyingma line) at Helgenæs - by cosmic accident just 10 minutes from my home - and a warm companionship which becomes large and flowering during their summercamp. Gomde is just one of many Buddhist groups in Denmark (see e.g. the book Dansk Dharma) but my heart as well as my philosophical affinity with the Madhyamika school (see my philosophical work elsewhere on this site) are very much at home there.

Kenneth Plon
Another very dear friend, companion on a long spiritual path, and fellow surrendering cowboy. Gone far and deep, and has also found his own super simple way of teaching and helping others go.

EnlightenNext and Peter Bastian
New meditative friends I found after I started working in Copenhagen. In their centre I am really juts a tourist but still feel much at home. The enterprise is strongly inspired by Andrew Cohen's "evolutionary enlightenment" - i.e. a style of articulating meditation and spirituality which takes it out of a more static oriental framework and installs it in an emerging, wakeful and risky historical process.

Meditation reserach
Emerging multidisciplinary network for research into meditation, as part of Bo Jacobsen's CAM research group at the University of Copenhagen. I have had the privilege of contributing a little bit from a philosophical angle.