All of DavidM's Comments + Replies

The first paragraph isn't about vibrations. That's just visual junk. Looking at it closely will make vibrations apparent.

The second paragraph sounds like it's about vibrations. The rapidly-changing graininess is overlaid by another pulse, yes? How do you know that it's a pulse, unless you can almost-sort of see the fluctuation from "nothing" to "something" to "nothing"? (In stage 2 the "something" is clearest, so don't expect the "nothing" to be overwhelming.)

If you can't label "pulse" or "se... (read more)

The twitching is typical, like I said. Not in the sense that every time you meditate, from now till forever, you're going to have it. But it's common enough in stage 1. There are also related things that can happen in stage 2, but they're not quite the same. So I'd say that they might be gone by stage 2 and probably will be by stage 3. Your body will get over it eventually. Think of it as your body trying to adapt to doing this new thing; it takes some time to iron the kinks out.

Good luck with your practice! Let us know if anything interesting happens.

The factory & lenses metaphor seems like a good argument for why meditation should work in the sense of allowing a flawed process to discover and improve itself despite its own flaws. But: the key part of that metaphor is that using a flawed lens one can discover the flaws of the lens, by confronting contradictory evidence caused by flaw; and people are notoriously prone to not reaching the correct conclusion when presented with contradictory evidence.

Well, the metaphor only goes so far. This process does not ask a person to explicitly apply wh... (read more)

The model for higher stages of enlightenment is not one that I can fit into a blog post.

One reason is that I agree with what muflax said: the most-correct model I know of will have a fractal element, which will be hard to represent in a simple way. In my opinion, for the first four stages, this fractal element is less important. Afterwards, it's more important.

I don't think a model with a fractal element is necessarily the most useful one, though. I think a linear model (like the one I gave for the first four stages) can go pretty far. Problem is, I don't ... (read more)

Should be noted that I take Zoloft and Lamictal in case those are influencing any of this.

Before you continue with this, I'm formally recommending that you run what you're doing by your doctor and get your doctor's permission before you do it.

Not because I think this practice is (or isn't) going to be problematic for you, but because I don't know what your mental health situation is, and your well-being is important enough not to put solely in the hands of someone on the internet.

Also, I strongly suggest explaining what you're doing to a close friend, ... (read more)

After concentrating a while on my abdomen a painful wave grips my attention and physically throws me off my meditation posture.

Try to observe that carefully every time it happens. You said that you can sometimes see negative feelings as mental objects and not "yours," so you're definitely on the right track. Consider ways that you may not be fully seeing them as mental objects. For example, are the negative feelings afflictions for you? How do you know? If you know because they feel as if they are, make sure you recognize the feeling "be... (read more)

Well, not having conscious experience isn't like anything. It just seems to me that being asleep is like something.

Not along the lines of having a sense that time is passing (one only seems to have that sense after waking up, so it's really "having a sense that time passed," as if the brain has some kind of built-in chronometer), but in having some kind of experience that can't be described normally.

Please let us know how meditation is going for you once your retreat is over.

It sounds like you may be describing vibrations, in one sensory modality only. What do you mean by "nothing"? Absense of a tingle? Absense of all physical sensation?

Physical sensations are a good place to look for vibrations because there are a lot of physical sensations that everyone seems to recognize are made up of fluctuating stuff. Most people are more attuned to this kind of fluctuation than to fluctuations in other modalities. Vibrations in other modalities are actually kind of similar, except that they don't "tingle", they just.... (read more)

The world does, subjectively, appear to be enormously fresh and interesting to me (compared to before I went down this particular path), which may be related to what you read.

OK, but, how sure are you that you have no conscious experience while asleep?

No problem. Send me a message and let me know what's on your mind.

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... (read more)

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.

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.

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 wou... (read more)

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.

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... (read more)

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!

&qu... (read more)

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)?

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... (read more)

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 medit... (read more)

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 h... (read more)

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 &qu... (read more)

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, th... (read more)

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 senso... (read more)

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 peo... (read more)

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.

Some very general comments.

Yvain may or may not be right about the etiology of your buzzing sensations (people get these sensations from many causes), but clearly what you're doing is affecting your breathing, which is the interesting part (you mention having meditated before but never had this experience until using my technique), and typical.

Twitching, inability to hold a posture, feeling like your face or body is contorting is also typical.

It occurs to you that twitching is related to the specific process of noting your breath, which is good. Also typic... (read more)

Thanks for doing the experiment and letting us know about it.

If you're attempting to use the technique I'm describing, remember to actively label all the mental activity that occurs to you. If the majority of the mental activity you can see is repetitive thoughts and reactions to them, the majority of your meditation experience should be the generation of a stream of labels related to them: "thinking, remembering, aggravated, in-breath, thinking, annoyance, hearing, thinking, shocked, out-breath, thinking, frustrated...". In some ways this is much more important than just trying to follow your breath.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I don't know whether 'vibrations' are necessarily observable by anyone who has passed through any of these stages, or are just a side effect of the specific exercises I prescribe to cultivate attention, which would not occur if someone has passed through the stages by another method.

Thanks for giving the experiment a try and reporting about your results so far. Please keep us updated.

I have some comments about your reported experience, but since you do seem to be intending this as an experiment, I would rather not say much and let you see for yourself how things turn out.

Despite that, if you feel the pressing need for some kind of feedback, feel free to send me a private message.

By the way, my name is David, not Daniel!

I would also note that enough English-speaking people have tried an intensive course of meditation such as that described by the OP that even if intensive meditation had zero effect on a person, I would have expected (based on just 'raw numbers') to hear of at least one meditator who is notorious for inventing a new kind of machine, discovering a new scientific law or for some other improvement to our civilization

This is an interesting point.

I notice no change in myself as a result of meditation that I would think is likely to have decreased my l... (read more)

Talking about the mind level is another way of talking about the brain level, though figuring out the relationship requires scientific knowledge.

I don't know enough neuroscience to translate the two contrasting assertions on the mind level into assertions on the brain level. I don't know enough about neuroscience (and perhaps today, no one does). But they are obviously translatable in principle. They are bona fide, explicit predictions about what future research in neuroscience will find. This seems to me to be a really good example of an explicit testable claim about the world that would follow from enlightenment. Do you see something wrong with it?

I imagine some people's minds may be quirky enough that they might eventually achieve enlightenment without ever meditating. So I would guess that it's not necessary. However, I don't know of any such cases, so I see this as speculative.

In the paragraph immediately after what you're quoting, I wrote

Partial enlightenment is preceded by the apparent momentary cessation of consciousness, which will happen at the very end of this stage.

which implies that 1) stage four ends, and 2) when partial enlightenment has occurred, stage four has ended. Given that, I would think that caveats concerning what may happen if you stop meditating in stage four would no longer be taken to apply.

I'm still curious where your mischaracterizations have come from. Perhaps something about my writing style lea... (read more)

I used the word "attachment" without explaining it. "Attachment to the world" I've never written, though phrases like that appear constantly in Buddhist literature and are often taught as central to it (as you seem well aware of, given your use of the phrase "Buddhist heritage" in relation to this discussion).

About these terms, I seem to be having enough trouble getting across the basics, so I think triage is in order.

If your experience includes something which you would call 'self' (whatever that means to you), some aspect of your brain's functioning is responsible for that. In various altered states of consciousness, the experience of what you would call 'self' is typically altered in various ways, which can point you in the direction of whatever you would call 'self' in normal experience if you aren't sure what I'm talking about.

So, what does it seem to you that 'self' in your experience is doing? Is it structuring your experience in some way? Is it not? Whatever you... (read more)

I suggested 3 months to a year for achieving partial enlightenment.

If you consider seeing progress according to the four stage model that I gave (or another more detailed model) to be something that reduces the uncertainty of the value of the pursuit, then obviously you will be in a position to better evaluate whether it is a worthwhile pursuit much sooner than that.

If you meditate frequently, you might (should?) reach a state of enlightenment. This will take probably at least a year to reach.

I wrote that a year is a good upper bound.

After you have reached 'enlightenment', you likely still have to keep investing significant hours into meditation to prevent sliding back into the period of mental degradation.

I explicitly stated that enlightenment is permanent. I should also have explicitly stated that partial enlightenment is permanent (in the sense of not regressing to non-enlightenment or a lesser category o... (read more)

"Attachment" has a specific nonstandard meaning in Buddhist-associated thinking, and I realized after writing Part 1 that it would have been better to omit the word altogether rather than try to explain it. So I would prefer to discuss the testable aspects of enlightenment without talking about attachment.

Erm, it's not that I just read the sentence "feel X" and feel it. It's that I looked away from >the computer and spent half a minute putting myself into a quite contrived situation. The best category would probably be self-hypnosis - and most people are hypnotizable. I have an advantage of having this skill in a sort of rudimentary way because my dad did stuff like this for a while (he was a social worker). I'm not sure how effectively I could communicate it to other people, but looking at self-hypnosis literature would probably give

I will have to look into this orgasm-on-command stuff before I respond. (I originally used that as an example because I thought it was something that would be especially unlikely to be achieved just by imagining / intending. Ha!)

Perhaps I misunderstood that metaphor you used in post #1, where the mind is like a distorted lens and if you get the right self-awareness you can infer the distortion and compensate. Bias is a distortion, right?

The metaphor only goes so far. Bias is a different type of distortion. If I had to characterize the distortion that ... (read more)

I see at least two basic ways that one could approach the issue.

The first is to treat it like a mindhack, and evaluate it by its apparent results in people who have applied it. Ask them what good it's done them, and observe their lives and behavior to confirm. Perhaps tell them what your idea of "useful" is and ask them to constrain their explanation of what it's done to those things.

The second is to examine whether it leads to testable beliefs that turn out to be accurate (cf. this comment). See if there is a topic which enlightenment is claimed... (read more)

The right control is to spend an hour every day for a year imagining the orgasm, >since that's the approximate duration of the proposed experiment with pursuing >enlightenment.

I see your point.

What is your probability estimate that a person who imagines having a full-body orgasm for one hour a day over ten years will develop the ability to have one just by imagining it (or something like that)?

For what it's worth, I tried Manfred's experiment and nothing interesting happened. (I understand "imagining a toothache" to mean imagining a visu... (read more)

Sorry, I read the first sentence first, and so experienced a minor full-body orgasm. It >didn't particularly vibrate, though - I don't have a clear enough picture of what that's >even supposed to mean, possibly.

Today may be the day that you learn that your mind works in a very uncommon way.

What is your probability estimate that a LW reader would have a similar experience to yours, just from reading what I wrote or something like it, in a non-contrived situation?

On the other hand, if enlightenment doesn't fix the really obvious flaws in our >b

The orthodox Buddhist position seems to be that 'impermanence' is both gross (the breakdown of macro-level objects) and subtle (fluctuations in all the objects of one's experience).

FYI, "Sayadaw" is a title / honorific, so googling just that won't help much.

The point at issue was communicating about higher mathematics with people who have no mathematical training, rather than people who have some mathematical training.

Remember, the original point concerned communicating about enlightenment. "Some mathematical training" may be analogous to "partially but not fully enlightened." "No mathematical training" is analogous to "never effectively practiced meditation."

I still believe with high probability that you think "higher mathematics is impossible to communicate about to people without any mathematical training" is true. A good place to find someone without mathematical training would be a member of a hunter-gatherer tribe.