Vipassana meditation

The relative rarity of self-awareness is a major contributor to neurotic qualities of behavior and to the classification of ordinary consciousness as illusion or waking dreaming by many spiritual systems, an idea explored in Chapter 19. The higher end of the continuum of self-awareness comes to us even more rarely, although it may be sought deliberately in certain kinds of meditative practices, such as the Buddhist vipassana meditation discussed in chapter 7. 

Vipassana meditation is a specific practice of nonattachment performed in the technically restricted meditative setting. Recall that the instructions (Chapter 7) are to pay attention to whatever happens, but not to try to make anything in particular happen or to try to prevent anything in particular from happening. The idea is neither to welcome nor reject any particular stimulus or experience. This is quite different from the ordinary stance toward events, where a person seeks out and tries to pleasant ones. Meditation, as Naranjo 39 points out, is a technically simplified situation a person removes himself from the bustle of the world to make learning easier. But it is also designed to teach nonattachment so the practice can be transferred to everyday life. 

A particularly useful focused form of self-observation is the type of Buddhist meditation know as vipassana or mindfulness meditation. 

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