From my limited reading on meditation, I gather that one of the things you’re supposed to avoid is getting dull, dopey and zoned out. Meditation is supposed to involve ongoing concentration, rather than shutdown. Were you trying to maintain concentration? What CronoDAS said aside, I’m not sure you got the intended result.
I think I have a similar thing, only in my case it activates when I’m trapped in a vehicle on a long journey. I find it hard to resist “sleep”—it isn’t regular sleep, because I can “wake” on a whim, but it leaves me dopey and zoned out for a bit, although I can reduce it by deep-breathing after I wake. It feels like “nothing to do, brain shutting down now”.
Possibly relevant is that I find it virtually impossible to single-task in general. I am massively parallel, and I’m accustomed to being aware of several processors at once. I can shut one down without it being a big deal; trying to do it to all of them simultaneously gets the result I described.
Possibly relevant is that I find it virtually impossible to single-task in general. I am massively parallel, and I’m accustomed to being aware of several processors at once. I can shut one down without it being a big deal; trying to do it to all of them simultaneously gets the result I described.
Meditation isn’t about “shutting down” anything, or at least certain types of zen meditation aren’t. They’re about shifting your awareness to a third-party perspective on those processes, rather than identifying with them as “self”.
So for example, if you have a thought that comes up that the situation is intolerable and you can’t handle it, then you notice it in the way you might notice that an update message has popped up on your computer, or that you’ve just received some email or something. Like, “Ah, that’s nice.”
You notice your brain’s activity (and anything else happening around you) as merely information, rather than as reality. Zen meditators are advised to treat everything in this way, whether it’s a vision of Hell or a glimpse into Heaven, and not to be distracted even if they seem to be growing psychic powers or having meetings with the Buddha.
The objective is both the active realization that your thoughts and experiences are neither as truthful nor urgent as they appear, and the development of your ability to act from centered awareness, rather than being tugged this way and that by your cached thoughts.
That’s nifty and interesting too - can you identify the “processors”? What threads are you running?
I can’t multitask worth a damn on anything but one conscious thread and N unconscious threads—and those tend to drag to a crawl if one of them is important and needs monitoring.
Luminosity in general lets me drag the “unconscious threads” into consciousness and control them better. But even before that I needed to be doing lots of things. I don’t know how many processors I have and they don’t have all the same features; my guess is I have two or three main ones that can do most things and another three or four that are very limited in what tasks they can do (these handle things like dealing with my sensory input). I have to do a lot of conscious handling of sensory input, which makes this less impressive than it would be.
From my limited reading on meditation, I gather that one of the things you’re supposed to avoid is getting dull, dopey and zoned out. Meditation is supposed to involve ongoing concentration, rather than shutdown. Were you trying to maintain concentration? What CronoDAS said aside, I’m not sure you got the intended result.
I think I have a similar thing, only in my case it activates when I’m trapped in a vehicle on a long journey. I find it hard to resist “sleep”—it isn’t regular sleep, because I can “wake” on a whim, but it leaves me dopey and zoned out for a bit, although I can reduce it by deep-breathing after I wake. It feels like “nothing to do, brain shutting down now”.
Possibly relevant is that I find it virtually impossible to single-task in general. I am massively parallel, and I’m accustomed to being aware of several processors at once. I can shut one down without it being a big deal; trying to do it to all of them simultaneously gets the result I described.
Meditation isn’t about “shutting down” anything, or at least certain types of zen meditation aren’t. They’re about shifting your awareness to a third-party perspective on those processes, rather than identifying with them as “self”.
So for example, if you have a thought that comes up that the situation is intolerable and you can’t handle it, then you notice it in the way you might notice that an update message has popped up on your computer, or that you’ve just received some email or something. Like, “Ah, that’s nice.”
You notice your brain’s activity (and anything else happening around you) as merely information, rather than as reality. Zen meditators are advised to treat everything in this way, whether it’s a vision of Hell or a glimpse into Heaven, and not to be distracted even if they seem to be growing psychic powers or having meetings with the Buddha.
The objective is both the active realization that your thoughts and experiences are neither as truthful nor urgent as they appear, and the development of your ability to act from centered awareness, rather than being tugged this way and that by your cached thoughts.
That’s nifty and interesting too - can you identify the “processors”? What threads are you running?
I can’t multitask worth a damn on anything but one conscious thread and N unconscious threads—and those tend to drag to a crawl if one of them is important and needs monitoring.
Luminosity in general lets me drag the “unconscious threads” into consciousness and control them better. But even before that I needed to be doing lots of things. I don’t know how many processors I have and they don’t have all the same features; my guess is I have two or three main ones that can do most things and another three or four that are very limited in what tasks they can do (these handle things like dealing with my sensory input). I have to do a lot of conscious handling of sensory input, which makes this less impressive than it would be.
That’s really interesting. Kind of cool that you’re aware of that.