So I have a chat set with DMI who is pretty much the founder of the practical dharma movement. This is good. He is one of the leading figures in making meditation into a science, and I feel like I could maybe help take his work and extend it to replicable and inducible technology.
But that’s a few steps away yet, so for now I’m trying to expand my mind some more. That’s going to be the theme of my life for… the rest of my life, I think. I decided to try something new last night - boundless space. Meditating on infinity.
This meditation thing… it gets better the more you put into it. The Goenka method had me focusing on moving attention rather than attending to attention, and my own bodged together method feels far more effective. I’ve started reading Daniel’s book so will see how that tracks, but for now - I managed to basically dissolve the body and mind and just be a plane of boundless space for a good 10-15 minutes last night.
So I had a sauna and loose-meditated there then tried to meditate in my room but there was a band playing and it was 25 minutes of filing teeth. Well; not that bad. It was still pleasant. But the music kept me attached to a feeling of time, and I couldn’t achieve full absorption. Equanimity but not very concentrated; more insight work.
After they stopped I tried again, and I rapidly sank into focus.
So most people focus on their breath, and that is where I start. I often move to my hands and the tingling there, but the object which *really* holds my attention is the ever-changing tensions of micro-expressions around the centre of my face. They feel like pressure-waves kind of kneading the flesh near my brow and nose and inner cheeks. They aren’t always pleasant but they are alway moving and always different and always interesting, and that variety really grabs me to the point where words fall away. It becomes an effortless and curious focus quite quickly.
I guess this takes me to around 2-3rd jhāna? I don’t know. Maybe 4th. Possibly even 5th last night.
So anyway I focused, easy, and found the pressure-waves and sat with them and let my mind melt, but then I decided to try to expand the mind to cover the entire plane of existence and emptiness behind the experience. The pressure-waves are strings in my string-theory and I shifted the focus to the empty planes on which they exist.
These planes seemed to expand, gradually, until I could feel the waves on my temples too, and then I could extend the awareness of the formless planes out further, beyond my mind and body, in all directions. My focus itself became the planes, and it was all undulating darkness and a kind of warm enveloping pressure, but not a pressure in any direction; like a dark matter kind of thing, because we all know what dark matter feels like yeah? Like being 20 metres under the ocean and feeling the water moving over you, but without any unpleasantness.
All sense of self and body and breath fell away. I could pull my attention back to my body and was vaguely aware that my mouth was open and head lolled but not quite drooling. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t hearing anything, though external sounds were low by this point anyway. Oh, and I was on an overnight ferry, on a bunk, so my body was gently swaying side to side and up and down.
Anyway there was no me, and there was no world. There was just a kind of awareness of emptiness and fullness and space and dimensionality which felt like it could be extended far beyond my immediate vicinity. I sat there observing it for a while and then decided to stop. Coming back to reality, I was still on my bunk, head lolling, mouth open, very calm, and 35 minutes had passed. It felt more like 15.
So I would say I’m getting the hang of this meditation thing. This might have been what they call the ‘first formless jhāna’, but I don’t know.
It kind of feels like cheating now that I’ve awoken to the lack of self. I can so easily step back and observe these things and say ‘not me’ and watch them like dominoes in a chain. The Goenka retreat definitely helped with the fundamentals but I always got too bogged down in technique and ‘am I doing it right’ thoughts. As soon as I felt something in a part of my body I would be moving on. Too much attention on the moving rather than the attending. Now, I find a sensation which is moving and changing - the microtensions in the face - and I just sit with it and see what happens.
I guess people meditate on candle flames and imaginary objects so any kind of physical sensation is valid.
But it was so interesting to go beyond that and into a realm of non-perception. I wonder how many more modalities of awareness there are out there. This entire universe of sensory and mental reality which is closed off from us over the years of building constructs of thought and perception. This universe which is closed off by the mere act of learning, and carving neural pathways of ‘this is red’ and ‘this is warm’ instead of just experiencing the 11-dimensional superstring reality in which we live.
It’s wild.
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