Cool. You probably are partially enlightened. I take the cessation-of-consciousness test pretty seriously. But, two follow-up questions:

1) How do you know that consciousness ceases? What is it like?

2) Do you notice any difference in your attention / perception in the second before, and the second after, consciousness ceases?

Anyhow...

The degree to which you're partially enlightened (or fully enlightened) will be hard for me to say much about, because most of the information I have about this relates to what people say about their current experience compared to their pre-enlightened experience (and you claim not to remember ever being un-enlightened), or relates to guessing on the basis of their meditation experience over time (which you obviously have none of apart from what I asked you to do just before). Even so, here are a few thoughts.

Moments where consciousness ceases tend to fall into three basic categories:

1) Consciousness ceases, and there is a big change in the way things appear to be afterwards. The basic model of enlightenment involves four stages of enlightenment (not directly related to the four stages of meditation experience I've described previously), and this category of consciousness-cessation occurs after advancing to the next stage. However, it can also occur when advancing towards enlightenment in a way that the four-stages model doesn't cover, which is surprisingly common. (The four-stage model of enlightenment is somewhat primitive and doesn't cover enough.) Some of your experiences seem to have been along these lines.

2) Consciousness ceases, and there is some small change in the way things appear to be afterwards. These tend to indicate advancing towards enlightenment in a way that isn't covered by the model. Some of your experiences also seem to fit in here.

3) Consciousness ceases, and there are no changes afterwards apart from attention / mood / mindstate. These tend not to indicate anything except that that one has cycled through the perceptual modes (and is a test for partial enlightenment). You had five instances of this after running my test.

You claim always to have experienced things approximately the way you do now, except you have noted a number of moments where consciousness has ceased, and various large or moderate changes afterwards. So you were not born fully enlightened, and I would guess (on other theoretical grounds) are still probably not, but are probably beyond the first stage of enlightenment.

If you're interested in this subject and want to pursue it further (publicly or through PM), let me know, I'd be glad to talk with you about it.

Other than that, I'd like to ask you some questions about your experience of the world. I'd like to hear how someone outside the culture of communities interested in enlightenment would describe her experience, and am interested in doing this publicly in order to provide evidence for or against the claims I've made in this series of posts. I'm also interested in how someone without any experience of being un-enlightened would describe things. (The descriptions may be radically different, for all I know, because so many of the typical descriptions are built around the contrast between before and after enlightenment, so I'm curious for all kinds of reasons how that turns out.) I can also try to give you some insight into how enlightened you are on the basis of your answers, if you're interested. Also wanted to ask you about your synaesthesia, for reasons that may or may not turn out to be related to meditation / enlightenment. So let me know if all this is OK with you.

About your pronoun thing, not sure what to think, except that maybe this is a "meditation hangover," which I assume has gone away since then.

My guess is that meditation trains a lot of different skills, that whatever my brain does trains an overlapping but slightly different set of skills and at different proportional effectiveness, and that the end result is me being all over the place and not really possible to place on the scale.

From my experience, it seems that the core skill related to enlightenment is "second-order recognizing" (with two aspects: speed, and range of phenomena that it has access to), and everything else is downstream from it. Other skills built in meditation seem to be either to be incidental or merely helpful in developing second-order recognizing.

In light of that, I would not be so quick to assume some kind of personal uniqueness in terms of the model I laid out, especially given that that kind of thinking does seem to be a common human bias.

Hmm, some of my many of my psychological problems that's been ruining my life for more than a year or so actually sounds a lot like how you describe stage 3... Than again half f every psychological effect or condition I've ever heard of does, so it's not very string evidence.

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.

more something like "I know that some kind of events take place inside my brain (I call all of these "thoughts" and am confused abaut how people seem to classify some as "imagery" some as "thought" some as "feeling" etc. Those words are complete synonyms to me.) 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 intuitively and self-evidently see some phenomena as happening outside and some phenomena happening inside, which is what "[...]other than location they don't seem any different[...]" means to me, that seems precisely to be sorting phenomena into two different piles. As if they come pre-tagged with "location" data.

As a long-time meditator, I don't recognize phenomena as intuitively or self-evidently "inside" or "outside" or "neither inside nor outside" or "both inside and outside." That entire classificatory scheme has ceased to exist for me. (In some ways I lack the ability to conceptualize what it would mean, although I remember that it used to mean something to me.) There is no location tag, and there is no empty field where the location tag would be. Of course, my model of the world tells me that some phenomena (sensory experience) represent stuff in the external world (albeit produced produced "inside," through brain activity), while other phenomena (cognition) merely represent the activity of my brain, but that is just a model, something which can be altered for all sorts of reasons, and not the default way that my experience is parsed.

How would you really know what's inside your brain and what's outside your brain, except by applying an explicit detailed model of how the world works? Is that what you're doing when sorting phenomena? Or are you using some more primitive way to sort (e.g. "sort by location tag")? Because sorting by the application of a model is not a low-level cognitive process, and has all the implications for what that sorting is like which follow from not being a low-level cognitive process.

Apart from this, I'm not sure why you think thoughts and imagery and feelings are synonymous. If someone asked you how you felt, do you think "visualizing purple monkeys" could be an appropriate response? (Are you a synaesthete?)

I can sort events by where they happen and put aside those who have the location 'armoks brain' but it's not somehting by brain does all the time if I don't tell it to. "

My guess is that this refers to the explicit sorting by the application of a model; for you, things come tagged by location, and you can choose to use the location tag to sort phenomena, or you can simply not sort.

So, unless I'm wildly misunderstanding you, my guess is that you aren't partially enlightened. But, who knows. Have you tried the cessation-of-consciousness test I described to Adelene?

When I said I had no self I meant it more literally than you describe the meditation- attained one. "my mind is comprised of various automatic processes, there is nothing that 'subjectively experience' them, and words like ''me and 'I' are just pragmatically useful labels the usage of which varies with context and which obviously don't correspond to anything in the real world. ".

As far as I can tell, "me" and "I" correspond to things in the world, or at least, there is a way to interpret them so that they do. They may not correspond to anything ontologically unique, but they definitely do describe features of the functioning of a physical system (your brain / body complex in relation to its environment) as precisely as might be expected from natural language terms.

What you're describing sounds to me like some kind of dissociative state.

(Speaking of which, if you ever need an expendable human to be tortured for 3^^^3 years or somehting I'll volunteer so that an actual person wont have to do it.)

In your opinion, what are you missing that would make you an actual person? The feeling of being an actual person formed of processes that cohere? (regarding my "dissociative state" guess.)

I can assure you (with high probability) that most people you run into would consider you an actual person rather than a sequence of unrelated processes, regardless of whether or not you feel like an actual person. I'm sure (with high probability) that you recognize that all the processes in your experience function together in a precise, finely-tuned way, which is how you're managing to have this conversation with me, and handle the rest of your life. So what's missing?

It actually sounds like doing this with just concepts (probably mostly 'that/thing /I-see-it/object-of-focus', which is a single rather simple one in practice) will work fine, and that's much easier and faster than any of the other suggested methods.

I'm not sure I recognize what you're describing. Labeling, at least when you get the hang of it, appears to be somewhat nonconceptual. (The method I described to you isn't "categorizing," even though it may sound like it, and even though the basic method of meditation I've described in the post has a lot in common with categorizing.) When I label rapidly to cycle through perceptual modes, I don't conceive very much at all about the object except that it's there (plus whatever concepts my mind generates by default upon getting certain stimuli, independent of trying to label). The label becomes something that gets generated in response to an experience, not so much of a linguistic / semantic thing as you might expect.

To give you another idea of why I'm not sure that what you're thinking of doing is sufficient, at my default waking level of concentration, I can accurately label "seeing" about 4-5 times per second. (I can second-order recognize that visual experience is happening much more frequently. Labeling is a crutch.) What you're describing sounds like it would happen more slowly than labeling. If that's true, and if your knowledge of cognitive psychology suggests that labeling should be the slower process, I'd say you may have that belief because you don't understand what I mean by labeling. (On the other hand, if you can do this with concepts faster than 4-5 times per second, I probably don't understand what you mean.)

I guess ultimately I'm not sure that I understand you and whether what you're suggesting is the same as / different from / similar to what I'm suggesting, and don't want to vouch for a method that may not work, even though you have a theoretical reason to think it will.

So, mess with the instructions if you must, but I can't really tell you what the result would be.

These will be my beliefs, conditional on the results of your experiment:

-You use one of my methods, and notice an apparent cessation of consciousness. Then I would be convinced that you're beyond stage four.

-You use your own method, and notice the same. Same conclusion.

-You use one of my methods, and don't notice anything. I would still hold out some possibility that you're beyond stage four, on the basis of your description of your experience, and consider that you're not implementing the method correctly (more likely to me), or that the method only works for people who meditate their way to partial enlightenment (less likely to me). I'd ask you some other things about your experience.

-You use your method, and don't notice anything. Reduces my confidence that you're beyond stage four somewhat, increases my confidence that your method doesn't work.

Thanks for being willing to take the time. I'm extremely interested in hearing how it turns out.

Using labels is actually a crutch. You could just as easily pick an object of meditation and have a nonverbal, second-order recognition that you're experiencing it. But you have to be sure that you're doing that correctly, and be sure that you're not having attentional lapses, otherwise it's likely to be much less effective. Labeling tends to force people to do this correctly. (About "doing it correctly": It's difficult to explain in words what the "second-order recognition" process is, so a person looking to cultivate it on the basis of an explanation only may have a hard time figuring out whether they're cultivating it or not. But people seem to get it when they label.)

An equivalent method which is not suitable for beginners but may be suitable for you would be to imagine a glyph every time you recognize an instance of seeing (or whatever your object is). The glyph would then be similar in meaning to the word "that." You only need a single glyph. (Multiple labels are useful for passing through the four stages or moving closer to full enlightenment, but don't add anything besides complication if the goal is just to cycle through perceptual modes.) But, make sure you can imagine glyphs fast enough. Testing this out on myself, I can produce labels at least twice as fast as glyphs. (This may be because I've had a lot of practice with the label method.)

You don't need to retain awareness of the labels after you produce them. The goal isn't to produce a list, just to rev up the second-order recognition process. Similarly, there's no need to produce a map or representation of your mental states over time. Just recognize them, moment by moment.

Not sure what to make of your situation. Specifically, I don't know what this means:

Stuff like observations of stuff inside my brain and outside my brain being the same kind of thing,

If you mean something like "it intuitively and self-evidently appears to me that some things are 'inside' me (e.g. feelings) and some things are 'outside' me (e.g. physical objects or their sensory representations) but they all seem quite the same on some level," I would specifically say that you are probably not partially enlightened.

About the sense of self, there are various ways it changes through meditation, even before partial enlightenment. A simple, intuitive notion of self is something like "I am the entity that thinks, intends and acts." One that is often attained through meditation and which replaces it is "my mind is comprised of various impersonal processes, and I am the subjectivity that experiences them / there is some kind of subjectivity that experiences them." If I had to suggest what an enlightened person might say along these lines, it might be something like "every mind process is impersonal, and recognizing that means that mind processes no longer appear to be personal or impersonal."

It's definitely possible that some kind of progress through the stages has been going on for you, which could be the cause of some of what you're reporting, even if it hasn't gotten you partial enlightenment yet. It can also just be, as you said, something associated with learning about the mind in an everyday sort of way. (Or both.)

If you think you can 'almost' see vibrations, then you can try to look for them for awhile and see if they make themselves clear. They do become clearer and more obvious when you have more concentration, so you can try to develop that skill and see what happens. However, keep in mind that this is a form of meditation, and if you're wary of stage 3, and haven't been there yet, doing this is a great way to push yourself there. You might as well just do the technique I describe in Part 2.

(In some ways, as a rationalist, you should be more wary of stage 2. Stage 3 sucks, but in stage 2, people are likely to form all sorts of false beliefs because the mind generates some weird thoughts and the pleasurableness / enjoyableness of stage 2 entices many people to give those thoughts way more credence than they deserve. Though it can be interesting retroactively to observe how easy it is to be misled by one's feelings.)

You could also try what I described here as a test, but the same caveat applies.

FYI, if you can manage to see vibrations after putting in only a little bit of effort, but can't pass the cessation-of-consciousness test, I think it's more likely that you're in the beginning or near the beginning of stage two (which does give some insight into the workings of one's mind), and more importantly, that whatever your mind did to get you there without any formal meditation will be something that it will continue to do, which will eventually plop you down in stage three. Whether or not you choose to formally meditate now, I would ask that you keep this in mind, and if one day you realize that your life has been sucking for absolutely no reason, re-read what I wrote about stage three (in Part 2) and see what you think then. If everything I said about meditation is wrong, it's no skin off your back, but if what I've said is true AND there is evidence that you've found your way to stage three by accident, you are likely to be able to save yourself a lot of suffering if you take up meditation then compared to just trying to coast through.. Forewarned is forearmed.

Based on your description, I see some chance that you may be right. Lots of things to ask. But let's stick with something simple to begin with.

Meditators who are [partially] enlightened can cycle between the various modes of perception, at first by meditating, and sometimes (with practice) at will, and at the end of mode four will experience an apparent momentary cessation of consciousness. So, if you'd like to see whether this is true for you, I'd ask you to do the following exercise and see what happens:

Even if you don't perceive vibrations, and so sensory experience of an unchanging subject appears static, it should be clear to you that the mental process of observing the quality of one's experience is "pulsatory," in the sense that observation happens as a string of individual observation-moments. So pick an object to meditate on (I find an unchanging visual field is good for this; doesn't matter much what's in the field), focus your attention on it, and every time you recognize that you are having an experience of that object, label that experience. (If you pick an unchanging visual field, your labeling will be "seeing, seeing, seeing, seeing, seeing, seeing..."). Don't worry about labeling anything else. Make sure your label corresponds to recognizing the experience (it shouldn't be a mantra, you should only label "seeing" when you have a clear second-order recognition of your first-order experience). Label quickly, multiple times per second if possible. If your attention gets wider or narrower during this, let it be wider or narrower, and just keep on recognizing and labeling your experience moment-to-moment. If your attention gets so wide that labeling only one sense seems ludicrous, feel free to use "experience, experience, experience...." instead.

If you are beyond stage four, then then exercise is likely to produce a variety of attentional and perceptual changes, but not really any of the physical / emotional / cognitive weirdness from the various stages (since by hypothesis you're not in any of those stages, according to the simple model I described; so you won't cycle through the stages, just the bare perceptual modes associated with them.)

If you are beyond stage four, you should expect that after your attention gets quite wide, there will be a momentary apparent cessation of consciousness, and immediately after, your attention will be narrower. Most people can keep on going through the cycle narrower-->wide--->cessation of consciousness-->narrower--->wide--->cessation of consciousness over and over, so if you think you've missed seeing it the first time, you can try again.

Don't expect the cessation of consciousness attained through this method to produce any sort of mental change, apart from possibly causing feelings of relaxation and happiness for a short time afterwards.

I don't know how long it will take to do this experiment. The speed at which a meditator can cycle like this may depend on individual factors, how far along they are towards full enlightenment, and practice. I would estimate 30 minutes to an hour as an upper bound. But the process can also be extremely fast (I can do it in less than 10 seconds). The faster you can do it, the harder it is to observe the attentional changes, but the easier it is to examine whether consciousness appears to cease or not, and vice versa.

If you can cycle through the modes of perception up to the apparent cessation of consciousness by using this method (and are accurately describing your experience), I would be convinced that your brain is quirky enough to have gotten you beyond stage four (to partial enlightenment) without any formal meditation.

(Note: I know my 'tone of voice' is odd above. This is a thing that happens when I'm talking directly to someone I don't know well. I haven't yet found a good workaround that doesn't involve getting to know the person. I can only directly tweak some things about how my automatic systems work. ;P )

Mine isn't anything to write home about either, so no worries. :)

Actually, re-reading this, I have two questions.

What experiences have you had that you think correspond with enlightenment? Do you mean the apparent momentary cessation of consciousness?

In what way do you think your normal experience is like my description of stage four (or mode four perception)?

I may have more things I'd like to ask you after you respond, if you don't mind.

Curious about your experience and why you think that, perhaps, you have achieved enlightenment or partial enlightenment already. What specifically causes you to think so?

There was a brief discussion of the possibility of enlightenment without meditation in the comments section of Part 2.

Another possibility, which I consider more likely without knowing anything more about your situation, is that you're simply in one of the later stages. As I said, stage two does specifically tend to lead to some sort of overall cognitive change that's for the better. If people don't begin in stage one, the most likely place for them to be is actually stage three (more about this in Part 3).

And there's always simply the possibility for error, which is quite common.

Read Part 2, see what you think, and let us know.

Well, I'd bet that a battery of cognitive tests related to attention and perception would find a cluster of really obvious differences between me and the relevant control population.

But I am not a cognitive psychologist. Maybe someone who is or who knows about the subject has some input on what to test.

EEG might be the simplest measure, but does it give any really specific information?

In my post I described mode one perception as having "various cognitive and emotional content but nothing very extreme aside from physical unpleasantness." Why do you expect some kind of overt mental alteration?

I already said that twitching is typical.

Edit: Lots of respect for doing a weeklong retreat.