My Year of Discovering How Weird the Mind Gets, Pt. III [Meditation]

This is the third installment in a series of posts on my study of altered states of consciousness. The January and February posts described my experiences with psilocybin mushroom tea and a sensory deprivation float tank, respectively.

This month (March) I've stepped up my meditation practice to at least an hour per day, every day of the week. (As opposed to a couple of one hour sessions as well as a couple of shorter sessions per week.) Meditation might seem tame in comparison to the previous practices (and some to come.) However, if one can quiet the mind, one experiences some of the same phenomena as are had during more dramatic practices, as well as other events that are too subtle to notice in other states. It's easy to get more excited about practices that dial an experience up to eleven than ones that require one to listen carefully and patiently, but that's a mistake.

Immediately after I completed the Vipassana ten-day course, I maintained a practice of this intensity for a brief period of time (as is the recommendation) before it became a bit cumbersome. (My discussion of the Vipassana course can be found here.) For readers unfamiliar with the practice, Vipassana practice uses bodily sensations as an anchor for the mind. One repeatedly scans the body, observing any sensations that one feels along the way without judgement. It's technically a Theravadan Buddhist practice, but is taught in a secular way. By "anchor" I mean some "object" that the awareness can be directed toward so as to make it more readily apparent when one's mind wanders and easier to bring it back because there is something to direct the attention. Besides bodily sensation, some of the common anchors include: breath, mantra, visualizations, or external objects.

This doesn't mean that every meditative practice requires an anchor, and the practice I've been using this month (by-and-large) did not. I use an anchor (most often breath awareness) to achieve stillness of mind, but then switch to observation of what thoughts or imagery pop to mind. One might call this an anchorless meta-cognitive meditation. One just watches the mind, becoming witness to whatever arises, noting it, letting it move on, and resuming the watch. For yoga practitioners, this equates to the early stages of antar mouna, through and including chidakasha (watching subconscious imagery pop up.)

One notices many things about how the mind operates during meditation. The coarsest way of differentiating what I find arises in meditation is the distinction between conscious thoughts versus the subconscious imagery. Typically, I don't observe the latter until the former have subsided. Conscious thoughts are often verbal as well as visual, but the subconscious matter is virtually all imagery.

One also realizes the crucial role played by memory. Often what I see is a memory residue of an image that arose. I've become very aware of essential memory is in our human style of consciousness. While in meditation one wants to reduce or eliminate the mental activities that come in tow with memory (i.e. analysis, making connections, elaboration, etc.,) one can't help but notice how central such activities are to language and other learning that make us uniquely human. Then there is recognition of the limits of memory. Just as one sometimes has an inkling of the substance of a dream, but can't pull front and center in one's mind, there is often the inkling of an image - gone before it registers.

If one is wondering why pick a one hour practice, it's in part about the maximum my body is capable without needing a break to move lymph about and restore blood circulation to normal. During the Vipassana course, one has about ten hours a day of scheduled meditation, but I still needed a walk at least every hour or so. As for why not do smaller time chunks, I've found that I experience some phenomena past a half hour that I don't recall experiencing in shorter practices. It takes some time to relax to a point at which one's conscious mind stops trying to make plans or otherwise go off on tangents. Feelings of euphoria, oneness, and ease of mental quietness tend to come beyond a half of an hour for me - when they come.

I was disabused of any notions that a daily meditative practice over such a short period would lead to heightened mental clarity and emotional control. I've done 26 days out of 31 as of this writing, and have been as wild-minded as ever, and certainly more than the preceding months. I can't say that this has anything to do with meditation one way or another. Perhaps, I'd have been even worse, given the nature of life's ups and downs, if I hadn't been practicing as such - but, of course, I can't make such a claim - not meaningfully.

That said, I think I've made some interesting observations about how my mind works and what its limits are. I can't say I experienced any wild mental phenomena, not of the nature I experienced during the long meditative days of the Vipassana course. However, I have been able to observe some fine detail about the sensation of shifting into a hypnogogic state, and other curious experiences that interest me. Subtle shifts of mind states have been a major point of curiosity for me.

Next month, I'll be attending a workshop on hypnosis, and the next post will be on hypnotic trance states.