Excellent thread! I'm also a long-time meditator. Recently I've begun using a great meditation app from Sam Harris -- noted (atheist) author and public intellectual. His interest in meditation began in response to his use of LSD and MDMA. He claims the culmination of a search for truly fruitful meditation was found in Advaita Vedanta and also Tibetan Dzogchen. His current method uses Vipassana (mindfulness meditation) as a base, from which to introduce Advaita and Dzogchen techniques. He also thinks highly of the work on "Headlessness," from Douglas Harding.

I highly recommend his app for his constant reminders of the real goal: transcending BEYOND the idea of a "self." It's far, far too easy for well-intentioned meditation practices to devolve into something too much like "thinking practice." The app consists of guided meditations every day plus "lessons," which are talks from Sam about the practice and the goals. This app course is called "The Waking Up Course," and it's available for both iPhone and Android.

Attached below are a few "lessons" and a recent meditation:

(Keep in mind that the guided meditation is 10 minutes long, and is interspersed with some long silences)

(unfortunately, there's a lot of subtlety involved in the meditation which had been gradually introduced over the preceding hundred or so guided meditations. The real object is to be doing this meditation "selflessly." That is, to have "let go" of the "idea" or "feeling" that you are an individual person who is "doing" something. Thus an important part of it is "looking" for the "one who is watching the breath" -- and finding, in fact, that there is no one -- and seeing clearly that all this is simply "objects in consciousness" which occurs without dualism: i.e., not as subject and object, as we generally habitually approach life).