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. (They use the fewest apparent subsystems; word labels would use the most, since those require input from the emotional system even when they’re for internal use only.) I should have little to no problem keeping that up for an hour or more, especially if I don’t have to worry about short-term memory.
Also, I find that I don’t expect this to actually do anything interesting—the intensity and focus on one thing is unusual, but I suspect it’s a very rare day when I don’t spend at least half an hour in total observing my own mind with this type of focus, albeit in bits and spurts and for instrumental reasons, and that doesn’t seem to do much. I’m still going to give it a try, of course.
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.
I messed around with this this morning, before reading this comment. Tried the labeling method, found it distracting; tried the concepts method, found it better but still distracting. Seems that adding multitasking to my usual way of doing things is not useful. Tried just setting up a thing-to-observe and then not messing with the observation-generating level, for a strict definition of ‘not messing with’, and had five minor apparent-cessation-of-consciousness moments in probably less than 10 minutes, with little in the way of described cycling effect. Couple of vaguely interesting synesthetic indications of mental things happening where otherwise invisible, otherwise no particularly unusual mindstates, but I did wake up with a rather wide perceptive field to start with today.
Will probably get natural grammatical use of pronouns back in a couple hours. Common mindstate, though unusually strong at the moment; possibly not as related as it may seem, but wouldn’t bet that way. Could edit for grammar, of course, but will leave as-is in case this is notable. (Existing instances of “I” appear out of place, but seem necessary to get points across without confusion.)
Possibly relevant: I appear to think very slowly to begin with; find it hard to even imagine doing anything multiple times a second, even very basic things like noticing. Have noticed this to be true in other areas previously as well.
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.
1) How do you know that consciousness ceases? What is it like?
In this case it’s that I was experiencing A, and then suddenly I was experiencing B, with an abrupt rather than smooth transition. The most intuitive—but probably not correct—explanation is that I stopped experiencing things for a small amount of time, and whatever automatic system is responsible for focusing attention on interesting things kept going without me.
In the major case I described before (we can call it the hallway case, for brevity), it was that I was suddenly experiencing B with no awareness that I had just been experiencing some specific A. (I think I lost at least 5-10 seconds of memories there, and possibly as much as a couple minutes—mostly unremarkable, as I think I was walking on autopilot at the time.)
2) Do you notice any difference in your attention / perception in the second before, and the second after, consciousness ceases?
The only notable thing about the recent case is that I don’t actually remember deciding to stop meditating or going to do something else—I remember deciding that five was sufficient, and then I seem to have lost a minute or two, including getting up and going to another room. I’d generally chalk that up to forgetfulness, but usually when I’ve been doing introspection that mode of thought sticks around for a while and I don’t lose time quite as easily as I otherwise do, so it’s a little odd. (The pronoun thing—which did disappear within two hours, as predicted—was unusual only in its strength; personal pronouns don’t come very naturally to me in general, and it’s not uncommon for sentences to look more correct to me without them than with them, but my mind doesn’t usually object to them like that.)
In the hallway case, I do remember that I perceived a kind of whiteness around the event, particularly when trying to access my working memory to figure out what I’d been doing; the presence of a specific color association isn’t very interesting (I’m synesthetic, most things have colors) but white is unusual, particularly since it was background, not foreground—my usual synesthesia is almost universally on a black or dark grey background.
As to the various categories of cessation-of-consciousness, the descriptions aren’t very clear, but I’d guess that the hallway case is a type one and my more common multi-day cases are type two. The more common cases actually have an effect kind of like taking a one to three month break from whatever it was I was working on when they happened (and I usually work through them) - at some point during the process, I lose all the same mental bits and pieces that one would expect to lose after ignoring a project for about that long, most notably affective response, awareness of fine details, and deep-seated intentions of following through with specific short-term plans. They don’t seem to involve any major changes in how things-in-general appear to be, but probably do involve minor ones that are hard to notice without a clear cue to check for differences between ‘now’ and ‘five minutes ago’.
I’m okay with answering questions in general, on just about any subject. I do reserve the right to decline to answer, but I doubt I’ll wind up using that in this context. I’m actually not all that interested in asking questions about enlightenment or meditation, though—it’s useful to get an outside perspective and learn established terms for describing things to other people, and finding out what’s unusual about my mind is always good in terms of helping to avoid generalizing from one example, but in terms of how my mind actually works it seems that I can learn more by watching it than by trying to talk about it in any detailed kind of way in a language with so few good tools for doing so.
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)?
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.
How sure are you that you have no conscious experience while asleep (in contrast to merely having no recollection of conscious experience)?
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.
Because, dreams aside, I don’t remember any. At some point at night I pass out, and the next thing I know, it’s morning.
Presumably in meditation you do remember what it was like to have just had a non-conscious experience. However, not having experienced it myself, I have a hard time imagining what “non-conscious experience” could be.
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.
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. (They use the fewest apparent subsystems; word labels would use the most, since those require input from the emotional system even when they’re for internal use only.) I should have little to no problem keeping that up for an hour or more, especially if I don’t have to worry about short-term memory.
Also, I find that I don’t expect this to actually do anything interesting—the intensity and focus on one thing is unusual, but I suspect it’s a very rare day when I don’t spend at least half an hour in total observing my own mind with this type of focus, albeit in bits and spurts and for instrumental reasons, and that doesn’t seem to do much. I’m still going to give it a try, of course.
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.
I messed around with this this morning, before reading this comment. Tried the labeling method, found it distracting; tried the concepts method, found it better but still distracting. Seems that adding multitasking to my usual way of doing things is not useful. Tried just setting up a thing-to-observe and then not messing with the observation-generating level, for a strict definition of ‘not messing with’, and had five minor apparent-cessation-of-consciousness moments in probably less than 10 minutes, with little in the way of described cycling effect. Couple of vaguely interesting synesthetic indications of mental things happening where otherwise invisible, otherwise no particularly unusual mindstates, but I did wake up with a rather wide perceptive field to start with today.
Will probably get natural grammatical use of pronouns back in a couple hours. Common mindstate, though unusually strong at the moment; possibly not as related as it may seem, but wouldn’t bet that way. Could edit for grammar, of course, but will leave as-is in case this is notable. (Existing instances of “I” appear out of place, but seem necessary to get points across without confusion.)
Possibly relevant: I appear to think very slowly to begin with; find it hard to even imagine doing anything multiple times a second, even very basic things like noticing. Have noticed this to be true in other areas previously as well.
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.
In this case it’s that I was experiencing A, and then suddenly I was experiencing B, with an abrupt rather than smooth transition. The most intuitive—but probably not correct—explanation is that I stopped experiencing things for a small amount of time, and whatever automatic system is responsible for focusing attention on interesting things kept going without me.
In the major case I described before (we can call it the hallway case, for brevity), it was that I was suddenly experiencing B with no awareness that I had just been experiencing some specific A. (I think I lost at least 5-10 seconds of memories there, and possibly as much as a couple minutes—mostly unremarkable, as I think I was walking on autopilot at the time.)
The only notable thing about the recent case is that I don’t actually remember deciding to stop meditating or going to do something else—I remember deciding that five was sufficient, and then I seem to have lost a minute or two, including getting up and going to another room. I’d generally chalk that up to forgetfulness, but usually when I’ve been doing introspection that mode of thought sticks around for a while and I don’t lose time quite as easily as I otherwise do, so it’s a little odd. (The pronoun thing—which did disappear within two hours, as predicted—was unusual only in its strength; personal pronouns don’t come very naturally to me in general, and it’s not uncommon for sentences to look more correct to me without them than with them, but my mind doesn’t usually object to them like that.)
In the hallway case, I do remember that I perceived a kind of whiteness around the event, particularly when trying to access my working memory to figure out what I’d been doing; the presence of a specific color association isn’t very interesting (I’m synesthetic, most things have colors) but white is unusual, particularly since it was background, not foreground—my usual synesthesia is almost universally on a black or dark grey background.
As to the various categories of cessation-of-consciousness, the descriptions aren’t very clear, but I’d guess that the hallway case is a type one and my more common multi-day cases are type two. The more common cases actually have an effect kind of like taking a one to three month break from whatever it was I was working on when they happened (and I usually work through them) - at some point during the process, I lose all the same mental bits and pieces that one would expect to lose after ignoring a project for about that long, most notably affective response, awareness of fine details, and deep-seated intentions of following through with specific short-term plans. They don’t seem to involve any major changes in how things-in-general appear to be, but probably do involve minor ones that are hard to notice without a clear cue to check for differences between ‘now’ and ‘five minutes ago’.
I’m okay with answering questions in general, on just about any subject. I do reserve the right to decline to answer, but I doubt I’ll wind up using that in this context. I’m actually not all that interested in asking questions about enlightenment or meditation, though—it’s useful to get an outside perspective and learn established terms for describing things to other people, and finding out what’s unusual about my mind is always good in terms of helping to avoid generalizing from one example, but in terms of how my mind actually works it seems that I can learn more by watching it than by trying to talk about it in any detailed kind of way in a language with so few good tools for doing so.
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)?
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.
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?
Because, dreams aside, I don’t remember any. At some point at night I pass out, and the next thing I know, it’s morning.
Presumably in meditation you do remember what it was like to have just had a non-conscious experience. However, not having experienced it myself, I have a hard time imagining what “non-conscious experience” could be.
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.
Also, while you’re insensible, someone might cut you open and mess with your innards :)
I don’t know why dreaming shouldn’t count as conscious experience. Sleep (unlike some forms of anaesthesia) also involves a sense of time passing.
On two occasions, I have fallen asleep and woken up without the sense of time passing—it felt like I just blinked.