The Mindful Universe

Prelims 1-5Introduction 6-15What is mindfulness. The start of my personal story. What this book is about.Chapter One: Paying Attention: to the Sun and beyond 16-31Establishing concentration and focus, foundations of mindfulness. Focusing on a leaf leads to thinking about photosynthesis and a photon's journey through space from the Sun, to considering the deep interconnected nature of Universe.Mindfulness practices: Mindfulness of the breath and focus on a leaf.Chapter Two: Feet on the Earth 32-49What is grounding, times when we don't feel grounded, how mindfulness can help, feeling grounded leads to consideration of planet, solar system, and exoplanets.Mindfulness practice: sensing the groundChapter Three: We Are All Stardust 50-67Reasoned thinking vs. intuitive feeling. Becoming more sensitive to the body and feelings. Feeling body leads to consideration of origin of chemicals (we are all stardust), life cycle of stars, and the galaxy evolution.Mindfulness practice: body scan.Chapter Four: Wandering Through The Universe 68-87Notice how easily your mind wanders off, consideration of past and future (in truth, there is only the present moment), considering what is time. What came before big bang? What's beyond the universe?Mindfulness practice: dealing with distractions.Chapter Five: Creating Reality 88-107Perception is influenced by desires, expectations and our past experiences. Suffering = difference between actual reality and desired reality. Humans are restricted to sensing just a tiny proportion of reality leading to consideration of EM spectrum, dark matter, and dark energy.Mindfulness practice: Beginners mind-sensing everything anew and open presence-letting things be as they are.Chapter Six: Passion and Awe 108-121When we look inside we find a mess of jumbled thoughts and emotions. Sometimes unpleasant or painful. Mindfulness = turning towards all experiences with presence and non-judgement = compassion. Leading to considering beauty of universe. Science isn't automatically non-spiritual, the incredible wondrousness of being.Mindfulness practice: Investigating suffering and just being.Chapter Seven: Melt Into The Universe 122-141Subject/object perspective (duality, suffering) vs non-duality. Consideration of quantum physics perspectives, wave/particle. Ultimately language becomes too limiting to describe Universe as it is. Only option is to be it, experience it, melt into it.Mindfulness practice: melting into the universe.Endmatter: Index, further reading & acknowledgments 142-144