If you download a Guided meditation app and stick with its daily sessions for a few months, you’ll likely have some surprising and profound experiences. Unlike a typical course, though, any profound discoveries you experience will feel largely self-authored, despite the presence of a teacher. You’re not going to learn by waiting for the Meditation teacher to “make you enlightened”: you have to put in the time on the cushion, receptive to your own sensations. All that said, while these experiences might feel self-authored, meditation lessons are in fact structured to bring them about. This makes meditation lessons an interesting example of an Enacted experience.
In general, Enacted experiences are hard to distribute. But these meditation apps scale beautifully: they’re a mass medium. They represent a promising reference for Enacted experiences have incredible potential as a mass medium.
Why do meditation lessons facilitate enacted experiences, while traditional lessons don’t?