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I'd love to continue it, as long as it's understood I'm mostly guessing and won't be very coherent. I'd strongly prefer to do it through more private channels thou.
No problem. Send me a message and let me know what's on your mind.
In response to
Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
First time poster here. Decided to try this about a week ago. Been doing this about 30-45 minutes a day since then. Here's my experience:
First 2 days: Did the breathing and labeling, not too hard to concentrate but got distracted and labeled the distractions. No vibrations. Not sure what you mean by that exactly.
Mid-week until today: At about 20 minutes in, I notice a couple of things going on. I start to sort of forget what I am supposed to say when labeling or forget to label altogether. I will get confused and not know that I am supposed to say "out" for example. I will know I am supposed to say something, but I forget what it is. Then I remember and come back to it. Also, I start getting spontaneous imagery and/or thoughts coming in. Like 3 McNuggets with a skewer through them - WTF. Then today I had one where it was a guy's face with a giant hole in it, and an arm was coming out of his ear and you could see the lower half through the giant hole. Or I would notice I was thinking some series of thoughts instead of meditating, then remember I was meditating and go back to it.
Last 2 days: Same as above but now at around 25-30 minutes in I will get a sensation kind of like your foot falling asleep, but in my whole body and not unpleasant. Vaguely like shivering but no actual body movement. That may last a second or two. Maybe this will happen 2 or 3 times in a session. Still not sure what you mean by vibrations, although the body sensation was kind of vibratory, like needles all over poking rapidly but not in a painful way. Is that what you are talking about? I labeled it "that".
After I stop, I feel a bit weird, like the world is brighter or more vibrant in a way. Hard to explain.
Anyway, that's my story so far. Any thoughts on that? Am I progressing or just starting to fall asleep? Some of it has a kind of dreamlike quality.
The imagery you're describing is really interesting. :) Could be a lot of things. If you're feeling dreamy while it's happening then it's probably because you're getting tired. Try standing up, siting in an uncomfortable position, drinking coffee, or something like that.
Forgetting what label to use or forgetting to label sounds like sleepiness.
You said the shivers are "not unpleasant," does that mean "slightly pleasant" or absolutely neutral? How would you say your focus is during the moments leading up to it, compared to when you start meditating or get weird imagery?
Body sensations like tingling, shivering, pins-and-needles, etc. are really good places to search for vibrations. It's probably obvious to you that sensations like this aren't static, but are comprised of rapidly fluctuating sub-sensations. (Imagine what it would mean if "tingling" was a static sensation. Would you even call it "tingling"?) So, how rapidly do they fluctuate? How quickly can you observe the sensations that comprise them?
I may have more to say if you can tell me more.
How sure are you that you have no conscious experience while asleep (in contrast to merely having no recollection of conscious experience)?
I'm moderately sure that I do have conscious experience while I'm asleep, actually, and I don't just mean dreams. I've woken up in introspective mode and caught the tail end of some rather complicated thought processes often enough to be of the opinion that sleep is mostly a matter of using particular kinds of thought that can't be stored in a way that's compatible with waking modes.
I wonder if this is a common denominator among people who have meditated or otherwise gotten beyond stage four. Would be interesting to hear what regular folks think about consciousness during sleep.
In response to
Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
Now this is a clear program with well defined goals and a clear roadmap to that goal. I'll definately be trying this out! I practiced a different kind of buddhist meditation a few years back. Unfortunately I quit right in the middle of stage three depressions. That sucked a lot and still sucks right to this day. Don't do that. I have no idea what you're talking about with these vibrations, though. The practice I did had a different focus. At the time of writing I'm only 45 minutes in but I'm already getting waves of negative feelings while trying to concentrate on my breathing in despair. I just hope I'll have a better resolve this time around to get over the bad stuff as quickly as possible...
Looking forward to hearing how it's going.
If you really are in stage 3, I would suggest not trying to shut out or ignore your negative feelings, whether or not you're focusing on your breath. Where are they, subjectively? What is negative about experiencing them? What are their exact qualities? Entertaining that sort of stuff can sometimes be helpful.
EDIT: My working theory right now is that the perception of "vibrations" is somehow related to the particular technique I describe, whereas the stages are more general in relevance.
In response to
Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
Am I missing something? Why don't the practical instructions lead up to the final stage of "enlightenment" and instead stop at "partial enlightenment"? Is there a further stage after #4 that might be even more dangerous than #3 and that you don't think is safe to describe to anyone who isn't already at #4?
Unrelated question: Does this "enlightenment" include any experience/realization of the sort described in Gurdjieff's "Fourth Way" as the "many 'I's"? That hypothesis seems very plausible to me given the structure of the brain as subdivided into lobes that subdivide into circuits that subdivide into neurons. At my current level of understanding, I like to think of the "ego" as the locus of the majority of your neural activation potentials, continuously flowing around from circuit to circuit (according to the rules imposed by the particular structure of your brain at a given time), with some circuits able to take control of your body and others not. This would mean that what you call "I" is actually various things, successively: "I am John's hurt feelings", "I am John's desire for revenge", "I am John's intention to put revenge into practice", "I am John's action plan manager" etc. Sometimes the "many 'I's" could even be concurrently active, which in common terms might be experienced as being conflicted about something, or being "of two minds".
Am I missing something? Why don't the practical instructions lead up to the final stage of "enlightenment" and instead stop at "partial enlightenment"? Is there a further stage after #4 that might be even more dangerous than #3 and that you don't think is safe to describe to anyone who isn't already at #4?
The practical instructions don't go further because the issue of going further is complicated, and trying to describe it in a reasonable and useful way would have made this post much too long.
If you can handle stage three, I would have no worries about your ability to handle anything afterwards.
I've never read Gurdjieff, so I don't really know. Terminology is tricky and I wouldn't venture to guess unless I was more familiar with what "many I's" means.
I am feeling very confused right now, and suddenly very uncertain about all this stuff.
I could guess, but the most honest answer to most of these is simple "I don't know.".
Fair enough. These issues can definitely be confusing.
If you'd like to pick up on this conversation in the future (or restart it), feel free.
[enlightment skillset stuff]
Hmm, updating on this I'd guess I a very wide Range of Phenomena, but maybe normal or possibly even worse worse speed. I'd also guess the incidental skills and effects are probably involved in the stages phenomena.
Also I never said I were alone in this. In fact we already know of two individuals that show these symptoms just in the pool of people who have read this thread.
Right, I wouldn't take psychological problems as evidence for being in stage three, unless there was additional evidence for that. Psychological problems are common enough. I have a lot more than normal psychological problems. Also I meant the specifics you described, like feelings of things sucking and blaming it on various things that turn out to have been completely unrelated.
[location stuff] Gah, no that's the OPPOSITE of what I meant. I mean location literally, as in x,y,z,t coordinates. And no things dont come PRE sorted, then I would have to sort them. Location doesn't sort into two piles, it sorts into an infinite amount of piles arranged in a hierarchy. Examples of location tags would be:
Everything>thisUniverse>earth>home>armoksBrain>visualCortex
Everything>thisUniverse>earth>home>armoksStomac
Everything>thisUniverse>earth>home>desktop>harddrive>documentsFolder
Everything>thisUniverse>earth>USA>EliezersBrain>MoRverse>harrysBrain>modelOfQuirelsBrain>modelOfHarrysBrain>modelOfQuirelsBrain>auditoryCrotex
Everything>algebra>sin(x)>thirdInflectionPointToTheLeftFromOrigo
etc.
The concept of applying tags to things that are not part of my model of the world makes no sense. An outside datastream becoming integrated into the model is what "sensory experience" MEANS. Same thing with like half the concepts you are referencing. "know" is defined as a part of the model that is trusted.
I'm not sure what would be an "appropriate" response, visualizing is an action, output not input, and also "how do you feel" tends to be after longer term trends rather than the exact moment, but if I had been doing nothing but that for hours "I feel purple monkeys." would be a perfectly valid response. It's weird, but that's because the actual state it describes is weird.
["me/I" semantics] Well as I said they can mean different things depending on context, and some of those correspond to things in the real world, but the most common meaning don't.
personhood
My working definition is somehting like "an agent that a correct and fully informed implementation of CEV would assign subjective experience and care about for it's own sake.".
Hmm, updating on this I'd guess I a very wide Range of Phenomena, but maybe normal or possibly even worse worse speed.
What you'd need to know is what counts as normal for the population you think you're part of, and not for people in general. I'm not sure I have that information, apart from this broad generalization:
-In stage 2, range is not very wide, speed is very high
-in stage three, range is pretty wide, speed is much less than stage 2
-in stage 4, range is extremely wide, speed is variable but not as high as stage 2
People who don't meditate seem to have range being narrow and speed being lower than any of the stages, but I'm not completely sure.
Also I never said I were alone in this. In fact we already know of two individuals that show these symptoms just in the pool of people who have read this thread.
Adelene did not assert that she was outside the model (like you did), but only that she thought she was partially enlightened without ever having formally meditated. That is completely consistent with the model. Her results on the cessation-of-consciousness test agree with what the model would predict for such a person. She claims that her everyday experience is similar to stage four (or mode four perception), which agrees with what I asserted about partial enlightenment (in Part 2).
Let me know if you try the cessation-of-consciousness test and are interested in sharing what happened.
About your experience, I'm not sure I'm following. Let me take a step back. You say that "location" means x,y,z coordinates. Before, you wrote
"I know that some kind of events take place inside my brain...and some happen outside of my brain, but other than location they don't seem any different and I get information about them through the same channel not sorted into two different piles like most people do.
If you visualize purple monkeys, what is the location of that and how do you know? Given how you know it, why does that method of knowing result in it seeming different than e.g. the way your feet look, on the basis of location, but not on any other basis?
Location doesn't sort into two piles, it sorts into an infinite amount of piles arranged in a hierarchy.
It seems that you're not talking about your actual experience (unless you assert that there is an actual infinity somewhere in your experience)?
I'm not sure what would be an "appropriate" response, visualizing is an action, output not input, and also "how do you feel" tends to be after longer term trends rather than the exact moment,
People can visualize spontaneously. (cf. e.g. hypnagogic imagery, daydreaming, other stuff).
Someone can say "I was happy for hours but all of a sudden I felt sad" and that makes sense.
Could "I feel purple monkeys" be an accurate response to "how do you feel this very second?" in the way that "I feel sad" could be, if you hadn't been visualizing purple monkeys for a long stretch leading up to the question? If so, it might be interesting to you to investigate how your experience differs from most people's, just for the sake of self-understanding.
I'd also guess the incidental skills and effects are probably involved in the stages phenomena.
My guess is that most of how the stages present is downstream from second-order recognizing and unmodeled personal factors, though 'concentration' can make a big difference here when formally meditating.
My working definition is somehting like "an agent that a correct and fully informed implementation of CEV would assign subjective experience and care about for it's own sake.".
According to your working definition, you don't know whether you count as a person, and are very far from knowing.
But this doesn't help, since you previously asserted that you are not one, and seemed to indicate that it has something to do with your ongoing "lack of self" experience.
Assuming what you meant was that you assume or believe with high probability that a good implementation of CEV would not count you as a person, why do you think so?
I am disappointed that an Amsterdam pot cookie had such a mild effect on you. Take two next time and you'll definitely notice the difference. A $7 brownie from one of my local medical marijuana dispensaries would likely have you laid out on your back incapable of functioning while going on a multi-hour psychedelic odyssey into your own psyche as well as experiencing such vibrations to a degree of strength on the same order as orgasm. You might rate it an event of profoundness on the order of a birth of a child.
A quad espresso does indeed induce more body altering sensations akin to weed than a pint of Owd Roger.
Just have to interject here that there is no particular relationship between "vibrations" (my definition) and orgasm.
On the basis of Kevin's description, caffeine is probably more useful for meditation, since it doesn't produce a "multi-hour psychedelic odyssey into [one's] own psyche." Caffeine's effects on attention and wakefulness can be helpful, especially in light of the fact that it produces no overt kind of experience. Meditation cultivates attention and perception. What Kevin is describing sounds like it would get in the way!
"Vibrations" are not a particular kind of experience. "Vibrations" are the manner in which experience presents, independent of content, when attention and perception are cultivated in specific ways. Everything from orgasms to blank walls vibrate.
I take the cessation-of-consciousness test pretty seriously.
Hey, I get cessation of consciousness for six or seven hours every night! I guess this is not what you mean though. How does "cessation of consciousness" differ from sleep?
In terms of this discussion, the most obvious differences are that this cessation of consciousness is momentary, produced by mental exertion, able to be produced rapidly and repeatedly, and without the typical sequelae of waking up from sleep.
How sure are you that you have no conscious experience while asleep (in contrast to merely having no recollection of conscious experience)?
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The same question can be asked of meditation and anaesthesia. One scary speculation about anaesthesia is that it doesn't actually take away the pain of surgery at all, you just don't remember afterwards.
OK, but, how sure are you that you have no conscious experience while asleep?