Living in the condition of having no internal dialogue, no flow of thoughts, no flow of images, just Smack, into the present is quite an abrupt thing. For the first couple of weeks I thought I’d gone completely mad. Oh my god I’ve totally broken myself. I’m fucked. And I discovered that I could still go to work, and I could still socialise with people and I could cook and get through all the basic things of life. Nobody outside of me seemed to notice any particular change in my behaviour, even though I was lost in this rapturous state of total absorption with the world. Wow, this is amazing, woah! And then life continued.
I’d run right off the edge of every reality map that I had because if you go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and say, by the way I did really a lot of meditation and my internal dialogue has totally stopped. Any ideas what I do now? Nobody ever winds up there in the West because nobody does enough meditation, at least they don’t do it right.
scott’s response:
Actually, sometimes people do come to psychiatrists with these kinds of complaints. I usually try to explain what’s going on, and they usually tell me they were just meditating because someone said it relieved stress, and nobody warned them they could actually have mystical experiences, and this was not what they signed up for. Symptomatic treatment and a hard ban on further meditation successfully de-mysticize most of these people, and they are able to go back to their regular lives. I assume if there’s an afterlife some sort of cosmic wisdom deity is going to be very angry at me – but hey, I’m just doing my job.
Funny how different people react so differently to the same experience.
There is also a third option: I can stop my internal dialogue for a few minutes, but to keep it stopped I need to stay vigilant because it tries to restart at random moments. The first time this happened, I was happy that I have succeeded at an experiment, but I didn’t feel anything ecstatic or mystical or scary. It was like doing my first successful pull-up after a few months of exercising: cool, goal accomplished, check, let’s find something else to do. I don’t see any harm in doing so, but I also don’t see any benefit in trying to stop it permanently (and maybe it’s actually useful for something, who knows). It is an interesting experience to see that you don’t need the internal dialog (thoughts apparently can spontaneously pop up in your consciousness fully formed, no need to sculpt them verbally), but it’s not that shocking for someone already familiar with the theories of Julian Jaynes or Peter Watts.
(I guess the normies are simply freaked out whenever they have a weird experience, unless they are accompanied by a high-status person who assures them that it is weird in a good, i.e. high-status way. Gupta had that kind of high-status guru, and a culture that supported him, Scott’s patients did not.)
related ssc post:
scott citing gupta:
scott’s response:
Funny how different people react so differently to the same experience.
There is also a third option: I can stop my internal dialogue for a few minutes, but to keep it stopped I need to stay vigilant because it tries to restart at random moments. The first time this happened, I was happy that I have succeeded at an experiment, but I didn’t feel anything ecstatic or mystical or scary. It was like doing my first successful pull-up after a few months of exercising: cool, goal accomplished, check, let’s find something else to do. I don’t see any harm in doing so, but I also don’t see any benefit in trying to stop it permanently (and maybe it’s actually useful for something, who knows). It is an interesting experience to see that you don’t need the internal dialog (thoughts apparently can spontaneously pop up in your consciousness fully formed, no need to sculpt them verbally), but it’s not that shocking for someone already familiar with the theories of Julian Jaynes or Peter Watts.
(I guess the normies are simply freaked out whenever they have a weird experience, unless they are accompanied by a high-status person who assures them that it is weird in a good, i.e. high-status way. Gupta had that kind of high-status guru, and a culture that supported him, Scott’s patients did not.)