It’s possible, but as DavidM says, one probably has to have rather unusual starting conditions.
My natural state of mind has, to the best of my admittedly spotty memory, always been essentially the same as what DavidM describes as stage four, and I’ve had at least one and possibly several experiences that match what he describes as enlightenment—I just never realized that they were particularly noteworthy or related to that until now. I’m good at meditating, in the sense of being able to just concentrate on one thing for a relatively long period of time (I find 10-15 minutes to be relatively effortless), but I’ve never made a habit of it.
I do find it plausible that meditation is the easiest way for someone whose native state is stage one to learn to enter and sustain stage four. I also find it plausible that drugs can accomplish that (I know of a particular, thankfully unusual, food additive that will send me into stage one, and avoid it like the bad trip that it is), but can’t speak for specific ones.
ETA: Oh, except that I have no clue what he’s talking about with ‘vibrations’, unless he’s talking about a particular experience I’ve been known to have when improperly caffeinated. They aren’t any usual part of my experience.
What experiences have you had that you think correspond with enlightenment? Do you mean the apparent momentary cessation of consciousness?
That specifically, yes. The one instance that I specifically remember involved an apparent momentary cessation of consciousness, blanking of my entire working memory, and an intuition that ‘I’ was not necessarily the same person who’d been running this body five minutes prior. I imagine that if I hadn’t already spent some time thinking about personhood and identity, I would have been quite floored by it, which would have been quite inconvenient as I was in the middle of a task at work at the time.
That general class of experience—periods where I experience oddities of working memory and general mental function followed by an intuition that something has changed, possibly with a cessation of consciousness that I simply miss most of the time—is not unusual enough to be noteworthy; I estimate that it’s happened at least once a year for the last 4 or 5 years, and possibly prior to that as well. The most recent one was less than two months ago, in fact—I remember because there was some specific food item I’d been waiting for Alicorn to get around to making before it happened, and then after it happened I didn’t want that food item any more and mentioned that to her. (I don’t remember a cessation of consciousness with that one, but it could easily have happened in such a way that I simply missed noting it.)
In what way do you think your normal experience is like my description of stage four (or mode four perception)?
My normal mode involves a fairly wide field of perception—it’s not unusual for me to notice things that are near the edge of my visual field when I’m ‘focusing on’ something in the center of it, for example, and I can focus on multiple modes of perception well enough to ‘transcribe’ the visual synesthesia that I experience with music in realtime, though that takes considerable effort (probably mostly because I don’t have much practice in general with drawing). Most concepts don’t evoke emotional responses in me, which actually gets me in trouble sometimes when I forget that other people do have particular, involuntary emotional responses to certain words and concepts. Monitoring what my mind is doing is not any harder than reading text or listening to music; it’s actually easier than reading a challenging text. Such observation is nuanced well past the point that I can easily communicate with words—for example, the idea that anger and frustration are versions of the same thing seems downright silly, and each of those has at least half a dozen different subtypes that function slightly differently from each other. (“I want to punch you in the face” is not the same as “I want to destroy your reputation” is not the same as “I want to do a better job than you at something you think you’re good at so that you know I’m superior to you” is not the same as “I want to make you cease to exist”, and each of those is related to a different kind of anger, for example, though anger varies along more than that one dimension.) The fact that my mind is mostly made up of basically-automatic subsystems is obvious to me because I can ‘see’ several of them, and divine the workings of several more, and I’ve been known to be able to consciously tweak the workings of those systems in limited ways.
I could probably go on a bit, but it’s mostly stuff like that; I think you get the general idea.
I may have more things I’d like to ask you after you respond, if you don’t mind.
Sure, go ahead.
(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 )
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. :)
It may be a few days before I have the time to devote to this, but I’ll give it a go. I expect it will take a while; my usual experience of oddness leading up to a change tends to take a few days, so I’ll be somewhat surprised if this goes as quickly as an hour. It’s possible that I’ll run into trouble trying to stay in a word-using mode that long; I may need to adjust that aspect of the experiment, but it doesn’t sound like a concept-based or visual-glyph-based take on it is likely to be significantly different.
(Is retaining an awareness of the last few items in the list of labels important? My first instinct is to set up one mental thread with glyphs that I can pulse to represent different kinds of experiencing, and another mental thread with the empty field to observe, but I can also have a line of glyphs or abstracted bowl of pebbles that gets added to or something in the first thread if that would better approximate the usual mental state involved.)
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.
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.
Wait, there are people who think “anger” is just one thing? wtf?
So yea, this corresponds reasonably well to my experience, and in fact I learned a few useful things about how neurotypicals apparently are different from me I think. The similarity is at least great enough that I’d say it’s the same phenomena and the difference are due to normal interpersonal variation.
Wait, there are people who think “anger” is just one thing? wtf?
Supposedly a majority, even, if I remember correctly. I still have trouble wrapping my mind around that one.
(Similarly, there’s one friend of mine who finds it hard to believe that I can feel my esophageal muscles doing their thing when I swallow, and I find it hard to believe that he can’t. He claims that he’s seen studies that put him clearly in the majority, but I still find it vaguely incomprehensible. That’s such a basic thing!)
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.
So vibrations will not necessarily be observed by everyone doing this kind of meditation? Well how are stage 1 newbies supposed to keep their hopes up during their practice if the main marker of stage 2 isn’t a sure thing even if you’re doing everything right?
It’s possible, but as DavidM says, one probably has to have rather unusual starting conditions.
My natural state of mind has, to the best of my admittedly spotty memory, always been essentially the same as what DavidM describes as stage four, and I’ve had at least one and possibly several experiences that match what he describes as enlightenment—I just never realized that they were particularly noteworthy or related to that until now. I’m good at meditating, in the sense of being able to just concentrate on one thing for a relatively long period of time (I find 10-15 minutes to be relatively effortless), but I’ve never made a habit of it.
I do find it plausible that meditation is the easiest way for someone whose native state is stage one to learn to enter and sustain stage four. I also find it plausible that drugs can accomplish that (I know of a particular, thankfully unusual, food additive that will send me into stage one, and avoid it like the bad trip that it is), but can’t speak for specific ones.
ETA: Oh, except that I have no clue what he’s talking about with ‘vibrations’, unless he’s talking about a particular experience I’ve been known to have when improperly caffeinated. They aren’t any usual part of my experience.
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.
That specifically, yes. The one instance that I specifically remember involved an apparent momentary cessation of consciousness, blanking of my entire working memory, and an intuition that ‘I’ was not necessarily the same person who’d been running this body five minutes prior. I imagine that if I hadn’t already spent some time thinking about personhood and identity, I would have been quite floored by it, which would have been quite inconvenient as I was in the middle of a task at work at the time.
That general class of experience—periods where I experience oddities of working memory and general mental function followed by an intuition that something has changed, possibly with a cessation of consciousness that I simply miss most of the time—is not unusual enough to be noteworthy; I estimate that it’s happened at least once a year for the last 4 or 5 years, and possibly prior to that as well. The most recent one was less than two months ago, in fact—I remember because there was some specific food item I’d been waiting for Alicorn to get around to making before it happened, and then after it happened I didn’t want that food item any more and mentioned that to her. (I don’t remember a cessation of consciousness with that one, but it could easily have happened in such a way that I simply missed noting it.)
My normal mode involves a fairly wide field of perception—it’s not unusual for me to notice things that are near the edge of my visual field when I’m ‘focusing on’ something in the center of it, for example, and I can focus on multiple modes of perception well enough to ‘transcribe’ the visual synesthesia that I experience with music in realtime, though that takes considerable effort (probably mostly because I don’t have much practice in general with drawing). Most concepts don’t evoke emotional responses in me, which actually gets me in trouble sometimes when I forget that other people do have particular, involuntary emotional responses to certain words and concepts. Monitoring what my mind is doing is not any harder than reading text or listening to music; it’s actually easier than reading a challenging text. Such observation is nuanced well past the point that I can easily communicate with words—for example, the idea that anger and frustration are versions of the same thing seems downright silly, and each of those has at least half a dozen different subtypes that function slightly differently from each other. (“I want to punch you in the face” is not the same as “I want to destroy your reputation” is not the same as “I want to do a better job than you at something you think you’re good at so that you know I’m superior to you” is not the same as “I want to make you cease to exist”, and each of those is related to a different kind of anger, for example, though anger varies along more than that one dimension.) The fact that my mind is mostly made up of basically-automatic subsystems is obvious to me because I can ‘see’ several of them, and divine the workings of several more, and I’ve been known to be able to consciously tweak the workings of those systems in limited ways.
I could probably go on a bit, but it’s mostly stuff like that; I think you get the general idea.
Sure, go ahead.
(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 )
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.
Mine isn’t anything to write home about either, so no worries. :)
It may be a few days before I have the time to devote to this, but I’ll give it a go. I expect it will take a while; my usual experience of oddness leading up to a change tends to take a few days, so I’ll be somewhat surprised if this goes as quickly as an hour. It’s possible that I’ll run into trouble trying to stay in a word-using mode that long; I may need to adjust that aspect of the experiment, but it doesn’t sound like a concept-based or visual-glyph-based take on it is likely to be significantly different.
(Is retaining an awareness of the last few items in the list of labels important? My first instinct is to set up one mental thread with glyphs that I can pulse to represent different kinds of experiencing, and another mental thread with the empty field to observe, but I can also have a line of glyphs or abstracted bowl of pebbles that gets added to or something in the first thread if that would better approximate the usual mental state involved.)
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.
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.
Wait, there are people who think “anger” is just one thing? wtf?
So yea, this corresponds reasonably well to my experience, and in fact I learned a few useful things about how neurotypicals apparently are different from me I think. The similarity is at least great enough that I’d say it’s the same phenomena and the difference are due to normal interpersonal variation.
Supposedly a majority, even, if I remember correctly. I still have trouble wrapping my mind around that one.
(Similarly, there’s one friend of mine who finds it hard to believe that I can feel my esophageal muscles doing their thing when I swallow, and I find it hard to believe that he can’t. He claims that he’s seen studies that put him clearly in the majority, but I still find it vaguely incomprehensible. That’s such a basic thing!)
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.
So vibrations will not necessarily be observed by everyone doing this kind of meditation? Well how are stage 1 newbies supposed to keep their hopes up during their practice if the main marker of stage 2 isn’t a sure thing even if you’re doing everything right?