Pål S.:
I'm just as surprised as you that people have been doing this for thousands of years and still this young pragmatic community appears to be the "cutting edge".
Anyway I was going to post a youtube video of Duncan entitled: "Duncan Barford talks about his enlightenment" which demonstrates this kind of open, casual talk I enjoy and also gives you a pointer as to where he's coming from. Ironically though, it's been removed.
Thanks for the mention, Florian.
@Pål S, I wonder sometimes about "cutting edge" and all that. I'm reading like a mad thing these days, and it seems the centuries are full of people who woke up, and then thought "Wow, this is so cool and I did it and surely other people could do it too, if they'd just do what I did, so here's how I did it! Come on, guys!" and then they get some students, and then sometimes they get turned into a guru or even a god. Sometimes their stories fade into the archives, sometimes they get turned into religions (and sometimes the original intent gets well lost or hidden under the growing institutionalization and politics.)
These accounts are important in that they inspire people to practice for themselves. I was blown away by MCTB, stuff I heard on Buddhist Geeks, and the work Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford were doing. The specific stories they told struck me at the right time and place in my life and motivated me to meditate like there was no tomorrow. And at a point I felt I had to write a book about it because I wanted to inspire other people - especially those who have a tendency to more ornate practice and energetic phenomena and so on.
But the more I read the old stuff, the more I think "why do we even bother? this has all been said so many times before!" Is it really so hard to encounter a sage of yore talking about chopping wood and carrying water, and not be able to get it because you don't heat your house with a woodstove and get water from a well? Does it need to be updated to say "write code, go shopping" to resonate with modern westerners? Maybe it does.
It is true that what motivated me most in reading the works by the guys I mention above is that they were not monks and they were not prim. That they were just normal everyday people. But I wonder if that was more to do with my own attachments to the pleasures of the world. Maybe I just wanted to think that waking up didn't have to mean giving up anything. In the brief hindsight I have I'd say I've rarely given anything up, but I sure have had stuff taken away. And sometimes that was not much fun at all. I seem to have gotten used to it though and tend to find it more entertaining than sad or scary.

I wonder what Duncan would say in that video now, years later?
Cheers.