PJ wrote:

Hi,

I like your blog. I combined meditation with high doses of LSD and I think I almost got stream entry – I saw the hypersphere depicted here: http://alexgrey.com/art/paintings/soul/yogi-mobius-sphere/ . Is that what you experienced during your stream entry?

I’ve trouble reaching a state where my tension stored in the muscles get released. I get sporadic twitches, but nothing more. Can you recommend something for a quicker muscle release?

Thanks

Hi Paul,

Yes I saw the toroid, but it was on its side (so 90 degrees turned compared to that pic, and also more doughnut-like), but I only got a look at it briefly the one time, while on LSD. During non-LSD fruitions they have happened too quickly to get a good look, maybe because I was not deep enough into formless realms at the time. Also note that LSD predisposes one heavily to “scripting”, meaning you end up having the experience you expect or desire. It took me about 6 months of steady insight meditation to get a fruition without LSD after it happened with LSD. Fruitions don’t interest me any more (though they still happen from time to time by themselves ).

I’ve trouble reaching a state where my tension stored in the muscles get released. I get sporadic twitches, but nothing more. Can you recommend something for a quicker muscle release?

It’s a complex subject. Firstly, you want to cultivate the ability to do this without drugs whatsoever, and that will take some time. Entry to hard third jhana, and definitely fourth, requires abandoning the body quite a bit (and therefore muscles will be relaxed). For jhanas above that you will definitely have no “muscle tension” in terms of tightness caused by emotions. So, attaining the high jhanas will necessarily involve learning to let go of muscle tension, and this is usually done by fixating one’s awareness on the object like glue so the mind is forced to no longer interact with the muscles (and they spontaneously relax, often at the entry to the next jhana). In fact, muscles relaxing spontaneously is characteristic, in my experience, of climbing higher to any jhana. So, entry to 1st jhana makes some per cent of muscle tension fall away. 2nd jhana, even more. By the time you reach fourth there is hardly any muscle tension. Formless realms, basically zero (and I believe this is one way the jhanas actually work — releasing the body’s input to the mind and vice versa, and is also why they are so powerful for emotional cleansing, especially fourth). I experience these upward shifts to higher jhanas as a subtle “dropping” feeling on each climb, which I believe is muscle tension falling away, connected to the mental/emotional shift. Some semblance of this “falling away” feeling accompanies every upward shift to a higher jhana, for me.

Another way muscle tension can be removed via meditative practice is kundalini. The upward energy of kundalini is effectively a kind of ongoing global release of muscle tension. However, this releasing process is often extremely painful, since the kundalini is essentially breaking by force the emotional/cognitive bonds that cause the muscle tension, and is also working on the physical level of making nerves pull through muscles back to their correct location, and is essentially undoing a lot of conditioning on both the physical and cognitive level. Kundalini should not be entered into lightly and can cause “kundalini syndrome” — psychotic breaks etc. I use kundalini daily however because it “found me” during my practice. I had the psychotic breaks etc. for a full day but now appear to be able to control the forces somewhat (though “stuff” comes up from it from time to time). I can release any muscle by sending kundalini through it, which I do every morning.

Then you have physical interventions such as getting a massage and stretching work done by someone qualified AND who knows what they are doing on some level beyond just what their textbook says. They can be quite hard to find but are worth it. My massage therapist is a yogi who also has three university degrees in various physiotherapies. He is worth his weight in gold. Your meditation practice will ordinarily become much easier and more flowing after getting such work done.

Then you have various relaxation programmes and guided meditations where they specifically instruct you to relax each muscle in turn. My problem with this is that they usually have you lying down for it, which will cause many people to just fall asleep. Compare this to jhana work though where the spine must be completely upright — and it is this “uprightness”, this erect pose and upward lengthening of the spine, which energizes the mind the most and allows the deeper jhanas. So, paradoxically, in high jhana you may well be in a high-energy state yet still have zero muscle tension associated with emotional turmoil (and I find the upper thighs to be a particular “container” of such emotional stress, though of course nothing really ever “contains” anything in this sense).

Finally I would make some recommendation of, as a beginner (I assume you are?), doing 5 minutes of pure mindfulness meditation BEFORE jhana meditation. During this time you would simply make note of locations of muscle tension — without trying to do anything about it! — while breathing. Stopping fighting the system is the first step to the system correcting itself. Just bringing awareness to tightness, without trying to throw effort at relaxing it, will in time have that tightness fall away on its own. “Trying to relax” is paradoxical — instead just note the tightness as you feel it without trying to do anything to it at all, and it will sort itself out.

Hope that helps. Can I use this as a Mailbag on my blog?

Edd

PJ wrote:

Sure, use it for your blog. 

Regarding my experience – I’m in dissolution stage (as defined in MCTB) right now. At what stage did your kundlini ‘find you’? I think I collected all of the pieces of the puzzle named ‘my depression’. Meditation is a great relief. I started meditating for multiple hours per day and left brain seems to be losing its grip on me – there is less and less thinking, I’m able to stay with my body sensations most of the time now. The missing piece is muscle release – I feel like I’m wearing an armour of tension I’m not able to shed. That’s why I’m curious as to when (relative to the progress of insight from MCTB) did you start experiencing your kundalini. Did you have the two snakes sensation doing up your spine?

LSD gives me the ability to experience my emotions fully, I sense them at my heart chakra. Unfortunately, this ability fades with the trip and I’m desperate to recover it with meditation.

If you want to create custom states, I would recommend the jhanas. They are the key to customizing your experience – especially the fourth jhana. As a side question, what jhana can you reach currently?

Chakra work is another possibility for custom states. Have you tried energizing your heart chakra to recreate the emotional states you want?

Yoga, jhana, chakras – these are all the science of altered states. I do not know much about chakra work formally – the chakras “presented themselves to me” after kundalini. They are just part of the overall system/formula. I let the kundalini energize the chakras as it wishes.

My kundalini awakening began while I was trying for MCTB third path. I wrote about it here: http://www.personalpowermeditation.com/mailbag-should-you-trust-my-advice/

One thing I may not have emphasized enough in that post was how unpleasant and jarring the initial experience was. It would have been classified as a mental or psychotic break if mental health professionals had analysed me. It was like what I would imagine a bad LSD trip to be like (though all my LSD experiences have actually been positive). It was real bad Dark Night shit – much worse than anything else I had experienced up to that point.

Currently I use kundalini energy to energize my mind before doing jhana practice, and it is a shortcut in this respect to very hard jhanas, very quickly. Most of this experience has been amazing. However, this practice does bring up a lot of my “stuff” – repressed beliefs etc. Kundalini is well known for this. I need to do a lot more work on it before considering trying to teach my combined kundalini/jhana technique. I cannot ethically advise anyone to take up kundalini work at this point just because of how insanely disturbing that initial experience was.

Insight meditation is not particularly to do with custom experiences – in fact it is to do with finding acceptance with WHATEVER experience you are having. Therefore, if you are looking to feel good (or whatever experience you want), insight is not only NOT going to give that reliably, but will likely drag you through the grinder before giving you any positive states. My view is: JHANA JHANA JHANA JHANA!

Now, I will give a brief opinion on MCTB. This is only my opinion, and has been formed after a few years of practising it. Firstly, MCTB insight practice is not the only insight practice. There are others. The only one I practised a lot before finding MCTB was Shinzen Young’s method, which basically just involves observing sensations with mindfulness and equanimity — and NOT trying to “see the Three Characteristics” or “shoot space aliens” like MCTB – which I now consider rather insane. I view MCTB’s methodology as flawed, and probably not good for most people – although a super-logical, super-left-brained subset of people (like Daniel Ingram) might benefit. (BTW, I think highly of Daniel Ingram, and think his book is generally good – I just have massive issue with a few key bits of it.)

My major, major issue with MCTB however is its MASSIVE focus on the “Dark Night”. You will likely not find this level of obsession in any other meditation work. Here is the major problem as I see it. The human mind has a tendency to associate events with its current narrative, whatever that may be. It does this very quickly and largely unconsciously. So, you are in Dissolution now. Well, by creating the label “Dissolution”, and having a concept of what that state may entail, and then deciding you are in it, you have given yourself a very high chance of associating many otherwise random events in your life with “being in Dissolution”. That’s what happened with me, anyway. This is part of what “scripting” is – finding the experience you expect to find or have programmed yourself with beforehand. The human mind is VERY inclined towards scripting. MCTB is essentially a script for a waking nightmare, if you take it seriously – which I did. Now, I am not saying that jarring, often strange experiences won’t happen if you meditate. In fact, they almost certainly will at some point. But by categorizing and labelling them all up as some long episode called “Fear” or whatever, you are effectively programming yourself to look out for fearful experiences to corroborate your script. This perpetuates and extends any fearful experiences that have arisen as a result of the meditation. I believe there are probably far kinder insight meditation paths out there (but I don’t know of any, as I’ve only practised MCTB and Shinzen Young – and Shinzen Young is kinder but lacks instruction on jhanas and creating happiness states).

Finally, MCTB fruition and stream entry and all that shit pretty much ended nothing for me. Maybe it’s because I was already very right-brained, but I tended to experience the world in a very nondual way anyway. As an example of this, when I took LSD in many ways I didn’t find the change in experience to be that different from normal life. I already saw/felt everything as connected and being quite like a dream. It is more likely however that my 5 years of Shinzen Young’s method had already given me all that stuff. Point is, fruitions etc. were amazing at the start but are now like “Meh”. I am much more interested in the jhanas now, for programming the worldly experiences I want to experience.

Meditation is a great relief. I started meditating for multiple hours per day and left brain seems to be losing its grip on me – there is less and less thinking, I’m able to stay with my body sensations most of the time now.

That’s good. However it’s not as simple as “left brain vs. right” with the left brain being the evil one. (However, I may have written things implying that in the past when I was just getting into Iain McGilchrist’s stuff). In fact, it is the left brain that creates the initial jhana states (conceptualization and solidification of the object) and therefore much of the pleasure. Make a friend of both hemispheres.

Really, though, it is the deep imprinting in the lizard brain, the amygdalae etc. that is the problem. Both right and left frontal lobes are highly reactive to those lower brains, and those lower brains are where all the really bad conditioning is. Kundalini tends to blast right through them and release a lot of shit, both good and bad. I believe one reason kundalini can create psychotic or dissociated states is by blasting through the very basic emotional relationships/associations in the amygdalae. So it can be very ungrounding, because it disrupts the basis of your reality (and even if your reality is founded on a lot of negative, fearful beliefs, those beliefs are at least STABLE until kundalini comes along).

The jhanas on the other hand suspend input from the lower brains, allowing the frontal lobes a chance to think clearly and inject some of their own programming into the mind-body. This can cause its own ungrounding, but a lot more concentration practice is required to do this, in my experience.

These descriptions are all highly simplified, obviously.

The missing piece is muscle release – I feel like I’m wearing an armour of tension I’m not able to shed.

Yeah, but where are the signals coming from to tense up? I think the key is the very deep programming in the amygdalae, particularly the right amygdala. To crack into that cycle, you have to really get far above it, and that is where the jhanas come in.

I also have heard good things about Neo-Reichian methods for removing “emotional armouring” though, but haven’t tried any. I have attached a doc describing various resources but I have not tested them  — this was something I downloaded ages ago but never had time to go through. I have read the doc however and it makes one important point:

“Kelley viewed the muscular armor as having a purpose for the person doing the armoring, and he viewed it a matter or choice for that person to either let go and experience fully the feelings inside when appropriate, or to block those feelings in order to apply purpose and to accomplish something. Also, he did not view the unblocking of emotion in someone to have a finite end — or a beginning.  He viewed the blocking of emotion, or the construction of the armor, as an ongoing process necessary for survival and for the full range of choices in life.”

So, it is highly useful to be able to remove armour when you deem it appropriate – and in my experience the fourth jhana is the best for this.

But it’s also important to know what armour is doing, and it protects you from responding “too openly” at times.

One thing kundalini did for me during the insane initial experience was to strip away ALL ARMOUR. This was madness. I got out the shower and just didn’t think to put on clothes, and walked around naked in the house for about half an hour. I literally had to remind myself to do simple things regarding social protocol because all that conditioning had been blasted away. I can see why people in “fugue states” end up walking around naked etc.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. Hopefully you found something useful here.

Edd

PJ wrote:

I’m trying to reach the first jhana. I experienced something resembling jhana few times during / very close to being asleep. I sometimes regain cosciousness at night and feel stable and pleasant vibrations. Last time I felt a female presence that was taking my hand and tried to pull me out of my body. 

Encountering these states before/during sleep suggest to me that I’m not relaxed enough and perhaps trying to hard?

I have had emails from people saying this method is successful for getting to jhana: http://www.personalpowermeditation.com/jhana-drinking-air-through-the-nose/  Please note, since writing that I now only meditate in cross-legged sitting pose.

I am currently advising people not to even attempt insight meditation or any advanced work until they have achieved the fourth jhana. Insight can be just too terrifying without the equanimity base provided by fourth jhana. The fourth jhana is a massive personal development turning point, in my opinion.

I’m trying to reach the first jhana. I experienced something resembling jhana few times during / very close to being asleep. I sometimes regain cosciousness at night and feel stable and pleasant vibrations. Last time I felt a female presence that was taking my hand and tried to pull me out of my body.

Encountering these states before/during sleep suggest to me that I’m not relaxed enough and perhaps trying to hard?

Not jhana, sorry. Jhana is a high-energy mind state with complete awareness on the object. It is filled with energy and rapture.

I recommend practising when the mind has the most energetic potential, i.e. in the morning after sleeping well.

The sleep phenomena you describe however suggest to me you have the potential for out-of-body experiences. Those can be interesting (and at times terrifying), but are nothing really to do with what we’re talking about here.

Edd

This website was started primarily as a creative outlet for my writing. As such, it has never had any particular goal or direction. Especially in the early days, the techs I shared were, more often than not, just what I happened to be playing around with that week. They didn’t fit into any kind of grand plan for long-term change, mainly because I was never able to figure out that plan for myself. Techs tended to “stop working” after a few weeks — showing that enthusiasm for a tech is often the real cause of its success (something that seems quite ubiquitous across much of self-help).

Regarding long-term techs, I was making decent progress with concentration meditation (without initially knowing that that was what I was doing), but constantly derailed any momentum I gained via the almost non-stop drug abuse (often posing as “techs” of its own). Then, I managed to waste two years doing Daniel Ingram’s specific style of insight meditation (Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha) — later realizing that I had already gained most of the fundamental insight the book’s method attempts to establish by practising Shinzen Young’s Science of Enlightenment programme for the five years prior. With its obsession with the “Dark Night” and “cycling”, combined with my overactive imagination MCTB scripted out a waking nightmare that became my life for two years, during which time I managed to ruin many of my relationships. It is impossible to say what would have happened had I not discovered MCTB — maybe those dark experiences would have found a way to manifest regardless. My suspicion though is that gaining insight need not require so much unhealthy focus on suffering. I believe that this time would have been much better spent cultivating the concentration meditation jhanas in an organized, coherent way — which I have now done. I could write a whole post with my views on MCTB (and they would not all be bad — there are lots of good sections in that book), but the crux message would be that it does not place enough importance on the jhanas, or happy mind-states generally. I believe the jhanas are the vehicle by which insight is gained (and so did the Buddha). I also believe that any successful meditation system needs an almost constant ability to turn on the reward circuit to balance out pain and bring spaciousness to negative conditioning, which the jhanas provide. My blanket advice currently is that anyone wishing to practise insight meditation should first master, at a minimum, the fourth jhana, for specific reasons relating to its strong base in equanimity.

Regarding the readership of my blog (and the forum that preceded it), I never intended to cultivate a following. I wrote; they came. It was a hobby at most, and I always considered the cult-like aspect which developed in the early days as a bit of a joke. Consequently, I never really connected the dot that there were real people on the other end of the line reading this stuff. I had cultivated a persistent state of denial about it, and the traffic reports, and finding my links cropping up all over the Web, still surprise me to this day. As a result, I have at times acted like a total ass towards people. If I wrote something, I would sometimes react in disbelief if someone emailed or commented asking for clarification on some point or other. I literally didn’t understand how they could possibly not have understood me perfectly the first time around. They were seen as an annoyance — someone interrupting the flow of my thoughts or getting in the way of me writing about something else. If someone wrote to me saying they tried something and it didn’t work — or, in some cases, albeit rare, that something I wrote actually caused them harm — my reaction would be something along the lines of: “Oh well — what do you expect, trying something some guy just wrote on the Internet?” This disconnect between my actions and their consequences in the real world is something I have had great pause for thought over recently, and I would like to take this opportunity now to apologize to anyone I have upset during this time. One of my goals going forward is to maintain a positive attitude focused on helping people move ahead with their goals, and to remain detached from any drama that may present itself on the blog or forum.

This website has also been largely a playground for my ego over the years, and my writing has tended to reflect whatever mood I was in at the time. This was especially noticeable at the height of the Dark Night at the end of last year, when I was writing stories like An Illuminatus in New York, my Star Wars review, and Illuminatus and the Laser Pointer — which, while frankly hilarious, were increasingly filled with bile, reflective of my world view at the time (and, in real life, I was just about unbearable to be around much of the time). Don’t get me wrong — I still LOVE writing stuff like that. It’s entirely for my own entertainment. However, I no longer see a place for it on what is supposed to be a meditation blog. Offensive, politicized ramblings just do not sit side by side with techs geared to transcend that mind-state. Going forward, this place is going to be inclusive. It is only going to be focused on providing help to whomever comes seeking it. I might continue writing provocative and absurd posts elsewhere if it tickles my fancy, and I’m partway into writing a book that is basically only that kind of content, but I need to weigh up the real-world consequences of releasing such a thing.

Anyway, that was then — so what’s changed? Well, a few months ago I reported on a highly disturbing event which happened to me, which after some research I found out was in fact my “kundalini awakening”. Whilst the knee-jerk response was to give up practice entirely for the next two weeks — and that was probably wise — I could not help but come back to meditation, as I had a sense that there was some unfinished business that had been started by that event. Indeed, within a few jhana sessions, I found that I could now effortlessly channel two types of energy at will, which I call “up” energy and “down” energy based on the path they take through the central vertical axis of the body. I began incorporating these energies into my concentration meditation to see what would happen. By channelling “up” energy at the start of each session, I found I could hit a hard first jhana within a matter of seconds (using the energy itself as the object, which, with eyes closed, I could “see” travelling upwards as a constant vertical stream in my visual field). I started making many, many notes after each session, of every cause and effect relationship between what I did in my technique and the result that occurred. Eventually I hit upon this formula whereby I would channel “up” energy as my object for 5–10 minutes to energize my mind fully, before switching to the pure classical jhanas with my breath as the object. Suddenly, I was progressing easily through the jhanas and entering hard fourth jhana within every 30-minute session. I started increasing my meditation time to 1 hour and sometimes longer since I was now feeling so much benefit from extended periods in high jhana. My mood started to become extremely stable each day after I meditated, with my thoughts becoming far clearer and more organized. I began to find that many things that used to bother me now no longer elicited any kind of response at all. In fact, it was the sheer void of negative responses in my everyday activities that first signalled that some major change was taking place.

Then, something amazing happened. One day, while walking to work, I noticed that my eyesight had healed itself. I have a -1.75 / +4.00 prescription, so, while not “blind” exactly without my glasses, shapes were ordinarily blurred beyond a few metres and indistinct a short way into the distance. Now, I found, I could suddenly see a set of bollards and road signs at least 400 metres away at the end of the road, without wearing my glasses. In order to test that my brain was not playing tricks on me and just inserting what I expected to see, I walked a little farther and found I could also read the text written on the side of a van around 100 metres away, which I could confirm when I got up close to it. At this range, normally, I would not really be able to make out that it even was a van, let alone read “Builders Supplies” and the company name written on the side. Over the next several weeks I would walk to and from work and challenge myself to make my vision as clear as possible. I found that by either absorbing into the breath or channelling “up” energy while looking at a distant object, the object would become clear literally immediately. Often, while practising one of these methods, the whole scene will suddenly pop into perfect clarity, while simultaneously expanding. The perception of looking through two individual apertures will vanish, as will the “shadow” impression of my nose in the middle. All that is left is a single, panoramic fairytale scene in perfect clarity. Sometimes I go to the park and just walk around looking at trees and things. Coming from being pretty blind to being able to actually see things is a bit like walking through the wardrobe into Narnia. This on its own makes me pretty happy. If my vision was 50% clear before this phenomenon, then currently it is about 90% clear by default when I walk out of the house each day. Each day I meditate, that default clarity is improving. Using breath absorption or “up” energy I can make it 98%+ clear within seconds. It is a bizarre, wonderful thing that has happened.

A few weeks after this spontaneous improvement in vision, I realized that it was permanent. I don’t need to “do” anything to maintain it, besides meditating every morning (if I don’t meditate that morning, which is rare, the blurriness returns a little, but the default clarity has improved even in that case). At this point I realized that, at the very least, even if it’s “just” eyesight, I now have a method which can change some aspect of myself drastically for the better, and which I might be able to teach to others. I started to ask myself: if meditation can do this, what else can it fix? Suddenly I was started to take really seriously the potential benefits of jhana. Just this one event has given me a massive change in perspective for the better.

Meanwhile, my jhanas have continued to improve and stabilize and I can now pretty much induce the mental changes I want in every session. The missing piece of my jhanas was the ENERGY. The primary texts I have read about the jhanas have been written by Western authors, and none of them command you to intentionally energize the mind prior to jhana (I am reading some Eastern texts now to see what they have to say). By energizing the mind using the “up” energy for 10 minutes before each session — and some methods I use to do this are here — I very quickly got the consistency in my practice I had sought for all these years. Prior to that, I had some decent attainments in concentration practice but the major problem was that on many days (largely correlating with my bipolar “down” days) I couldn’t get the jhanas stable or working how I wanted them, and often I would lose momentum and drift into some dreamy thoughts instead and then maybe not practise again for a while out of frustration or turn to drugs as a shortcut. Introducing this “up” energy into my practice has given me rock-solid consistency, and I am going to incorporate such energy work into the next version of the Basic Concentration Meditation guide, which I have started writing. I am working from the assumption that introducing a little energy work into the practice won’t necessarily lead to everyone having some disturbing “kundalini awakening” and going crazy. I have to assume that, because the benefits of energizing prior to concentration practice for me have been too great to ignore and I feel they could revolutionize some people’s practice.

Since my meditation has really come together these last few weeks, I have found that I have some rich intuitive knowledge of how the different systems — concentration, insight, kundalini, and other meditation/energy systems — all fit together. They all seem to be describing the same fundamental process of conscious awakening, but using different models, ideas and labels. While these different approaches can give very different results in the short and mid term, they tend to converge to the same destination in the long term. Concentration necessarily begins to produce insight the longer you do it; insight work produces states of high concentration and bliss the longer you do it; kundalini is the ever-present energy stimulating the practice and being released and re-channelled at all times during the practice. I intend to use this knowledge to make new meditation guides which allow people to combine systems, and move forward using another system if they have got stuck in their current one.

In other news, I got my DNA tested at 23andme.com. A couple of interesting things came out of this. The first is that I only have 2.4% Neanderthal DNA, compared to the European average of 2.7%. I am not a Neanderthal — no one is. I had started seriously backing out of the Edenism reality tunnel over a year ago and had all but abandoned it by the time I got my test results, so this was no shock. While Edenism as espoused by Koanic and Tex is no doubt nutty and based firmly in the fear/ racial superiority/ religious zealotry paradigm, one thing I will be keeping from my time in that reality tunnel is their combined description of the introvert (primarily using Tex’s model of larger, simpler amygdalae), combined with my own ample observations. One guide I intend to write is Basic Introvert, which will set out what an introvert is and how they can unlock their massive potential to move forward in the world, using methods like concentration meditation to eliminate their often massive anxieties and remould the emotional foundation of their experience.

The second interesting thing from the 23andme.com data was the genetic markers for mental health. 23andme.com do not report directly on these matters because they were slapped with an injunction from the FDA not long ago banning them from doing so. You must therefore download your raw data from 23andme.com and submit it to various other sites such as geneticgenie.org and codegen.eu. It is tricky business, analysing your own genome so I would appreciate any guidance on doing so. One thing geneticgenie.org told me however is that I have double copies of the MAO gene mutation, and a single copy of the COMT variant that makes people insane. Each on their own is pretty bad, but together they are known to cause real mental problems, including major depression, borderline personality disorder, and a greatly increased risk of suicide. The genes explain a lot of my erratic behaviour, drug addictions and mood problems over the last several years. However, over the last several weeks, since my meditation practice came together, I am happy to say that symptoms I associated with mental health problems in the past have all but disappeared. For example, I have written in depth at times on this blog that I identify as “bipolar lite” (cyclothymia). Under this condition, for me, days were fairly starkly divided into “up” and “down” days. I would know what kind of day it was before I even opened my eyes in the morning. If it was a “down” day I simply would not want to get out of bed. However, now, if it’s a “down” day, I can channel some “up” energy up through my spine and out through the crown of my head and turn it into an “up” day in a matter of seconds. That would have been unfathomable to me even just a few months ago. There is the potential to use your genetic data to find health supplements to try in order to treat (or pre-treat) various conditions caused by genes. I would like guidance on how best to do this, if anyone would like to comment. One of my new goals is super-health, so expect this blog to begin covering genes and supplements in the future.

I have a current supplement programme which I use to enhance my meditation, and this is as follows. I have two regimes, and I switch between them every two weeks in order that tolerance doesn’t build. The first is St. John’s Wort at a dosage of six times whatever it says on the pack. So, if it says “1 pill a day”, I will take 6 pills in the morning (women be warned: St. John’s Wort can invalidate the birth control pill). I do not invest in the good, highly refined SJW extract. Allegedly, the cheap supermarket stuff I buy is made with stems, which contain MAO inhibitors. Since these are also stimulants, I do not know why they would be discarded in the more highly refined extract. In the past I have always found that pills or capsules made from the whole plant are better than just the extract from the flower tips. The effect of St. John’s Wort is to make the kundalini up-energy more easy to build and turn into a coherent vertical upward stream. This stream appears brilliant blue-white while on St. John’s Wort. This can be used to make jhanas very intense yet relaxing. The energy stream becomes very clean and easily passes up through the spine and out the crown. The main jhana factor that stands forward from St. John’s Wort is rapture. SJW is something I had played around with many times over the years and I had always had interesting effects from it; now I know exactly how to use it in my meditation practice.

My second programme is 200mg L-theanine plus 100mg caffeine, taken in the morning 1 hour before I intend to wake up (so, take it at 6am then wake up fresh at 7am). This combination is taken straight from Absolutus’s Reddit posts, and is a personal favourite of his. The trick is that the theanine takes the edge off the caffeine quite nicely, making it non-jittery. The feeling is therefore best described as “full” (meaning one feels both energized and satisfied). This combination has subtle yet awesome effect on jhana, causing the jhana factors of bliss and equanimity to stand forward most. The equanimity particularly persists so long as the l-theanine is still circulating, which is basically all day.

In summary, my personal goals have changed from:

• “Escape life by getting enlightened”

to:

• “Live the best life by cultivating superior mind-states and super-health, and developing the tech to help others so the same.”

Or something like that, haha. And those are the kinds of topics that are going to be covered in the blog from now on.

Speak soon!

WetWaterDrop wrote:

Hey man, how you been?

I’m prepping for my first LSD trip and was open to any advice you may have to throw my way. I’m probably going to combine B. caapi with it.

We talked once and discussed my migraines and how you thought about LSD and seeing the universe as a hologram for healing oneself or something. I rarely get migraines anymore (stretching my spine out pretty much fixed them) but was curious about how I should go into the experience to get the most out of it.

Hit me back when you got the time, cheers!

What is it you want? Experience is very customizable via LSD in terms of setting yourself on certain paths.

And make sure you get plenty of valium (or preferably a stronger benzo) to end the trip. Ideally you want an antipsychotic like quetiapine. LSD can go on and on and on and on. 12 hours is typical for my trips.

WetWaterDrop wrote:

I’ve had 48 hour plus trips with other stuff so I’m not too worried about the length.

I want to figure out this human machine our consciousness is stored and how my consciousness can act separate from it.

My leg still hurts from a car wreck, I want my body to regenerate that tissue.

I want to understand what chakras are and what siddhas are, what the third eye is and how it comes together, and to have agency over these things.

I guess im shooting for wisdom but I want the details and the mechanics, not just “Love and live its all a journey”

Oh right. Well the universe is just awareness, and the “sensation” is the lowest unit of that awareness, though awareness also spontaneously becomes waves (which is what you think of as an “experience”, since it flows seamlessly from one moment to the next. Wave/particle duality is very easily observable as being part of the awareness function, especially in these altered states.

During your trip you will want to try to detect individual sensations (particles) and see them flowing in the nerves. I can now have an entire synaesthetic map of my body showing awareness flowing through any tissue. I have seen the entire nervous system lit up before, including brain areas, similar to this:

http://previews.123rf.com/images/eraxion/eraxion1302/eraxion130201867/18071616-3d-rendered-illustration-of-the-spinal-cord-Stock-Illustration-nervous-system-spinal.jpg

http://www.3dscience.com/img/Products/3D_Models/Human_Anatomy/Male_System/Male_Nervous_3.0/supporting_images/nervous-8.jpg

(I can do this without LSD, now, and if I open my eyes after doing this then the whole world has that flashing hologram-look that LSD brings – so tripping is something we can do without drugs; it’s a part of the awareness function itself.)

When you are aware of the sensations and how they themselves generate the impression of a human body, you will want to flood the damaged tissue with that awareness. This will likely hurt – a lot.

You can imagine the tissue healing etc. if you want but my view is that the awareness itself is the key to changing the hologram. I would make a formal resolution: “I intend that any tissue my awareness passes through will be reborn” etc. etc. Formal statements of intention are very powerful and your experience as a human itself will have been started with such a formal intention aeons ago.

As a separate game, if you can get good impressions of the sensations themselves, try and zoom right in on them. You may see them at this point as stars in a star field. Keep zooming till you just have one, centre-field. Keep zooming and it will explode and you will get a fruition.

I can do all these things without drugs. This stuff is infinitely fascinating and all the things you see, all the cycles you go through, are just little versions of life’s story. The fruition moment of extinction is the end of the Universe; when reality rebirths a moment later that is the Big Bang. These are also fractal versions of human life and death. One thing that going through these experiences hundreds of times has taught me is that there is no such thing as death in terms of end of consciousness – awareness will just pass through into the next experience seamlessly.

Understanding tends to come mostly post-trip. Rather than trying to understand stuff directly while on LSD I think the time is better spent doing magick. So, heal your body. Also, plan out the next phase of your life – all the adventures you want to experience, etc. Set serious formal intentions during the trip (plan some out beforehand; but also let the drug give you ideas).

What do you mean by “Siddha”?

WetWaterDrop wrote:

Thanks for taking the time out for such a thoughtful reply.

Siddha – for instance you had the “gambling” siddha. For me it means destroying limitations, gaining perception.

Being able to astral project at will would be a siddha, being able to heal myself, siddha, being able to move my awareness outside of my body into lets say a tree.

“You may see them at this point as stars in a star field. Keep zooming till you just have one, centre-field. Keep zooming and it will explode and you will get a fruition.”

I did that once in deep meditation, my body became a universe filled with starts,  shortly after I lost consciousness and woke up I dont know how long later with my whole body buzzing.

“SIDDHI.”

I thought you meant that, but siddha also means something so I needed to check.

The siddhis can be understood more easily under the context that everything is just awareness. So, take “physical reality” out of the equation entirely and consider everything you experience to just be made of thought.

The more dissociated a state you get into, the easier certain siddhis become. LSD is quite good for that. You could try gambling while on LSD. Just visualize what you want the reels (or cards or whatever) to be before you play the game. Picture the reels till the visualization becomes so real it almost has a life of its own, like you could reach out and touch them. Then spin the reels in real life and they’ll become the visualization. I remember at one point having +£6000 on the meter having started with only £100. By morning (and a whole bottle of vodka later) I was on -£3000. I seemed unable to accept the repercussions of a malleable reality and apparently had to sabotage it. It was however one of the most intensely fun and jaw-dropping times in my life.

WetWaterDrop wrote:

Siddhi, got it.

I went to a shaman lecture in new york and picked up one of his books, in it describes things such as:

“The ability to shape shift comes from ones understanding that all creation is equal, and nothing is better or worse than anything else” – that would be a siddhi born of insight I’d assume.

Another one I found interesting:

“The third chakra is the power center in the luminous energy system, its power can be used constructively, to manifest our aspirations in the world. When used destructively, it can repress our primary nature or libido, which manifests as neurotic symptoms including shame and guilt”

Shamans believe cleaning the chakra/using them is the basis for our experiences here.

“apparently had to sabotage”

I wrote that down as something to delve into, rising above self sabotaging behavior.

“”The third chakra is the power center in the luminous energy system, its power can be used constructively, to manifest our aspirations in the world. When used destructively, it can repress our primary nature or libido, which manifests as neurotic symptoms including shame and guilt””

I am only recently getting into the chakras as a result of kundalini awakening. During attempts at both insight and concentration meditation I will be drawn to various chakra locations and often have to work through them before being able to get, for example, a jhana.

I can see how playing with the chakras might improve intention-manifestation. The relevant chakras will also tend to activate while doing intention work.

My feeling about chakra work while on LSD is that they will not function reliably as LSD so powerfully messes with and activates the chakras. For example, the solar plexus chakra you just mentioned will tend to turn on compulsively while on LSD giving a very intense “drenching” feeling. You will simply have to experiment though!

“”apparently had to sabotage”

I wrote that down as something to delve into, rising above self sabotaging behavior.”

I do not think it is particularly “self-sabotage” in terms of “self” sabotaging the progress of “self” (though there might be some of that). Rather, this kind of sabotage is more about the implications such malleability of reality would have for THIS experience. An extra £6000 of cash would powerfully change the course of my life. I could go on all kinds of crazy adventures with that money. But a more important lesson is that, if I managed to retain that money, there would be nothing stopping me simply WILLING £6000 into existence every week (or even more regularly) using magick. THIS is the real crux of the whole “sabotage” compulsion, I believe. Such blatant manipulations of reality would bring about a premature end to the “limitation simulator”. Evidently I want to slosh around in the detritus of human experience for a little while longer.

You’ll probably get all kinds of realizations like that while on LSD. I am grateful that I had so much meditation experience before taking LSD – it was more like a weekend on retreat than some major head-fuck people usually report it as.

Update:

I’m not posting very much recently because I’m writing my new jhana guide. The reason it is taking so long is that I spent the last two months learning traditional anapanasati (meditation with the sensations of breath at the tip of the nose as the object) in order to see the differences and commonalities between that and my usual kundalini jhanas (using the energy stream itself as the object). The result will likely be a hybrid method utilizing both breath-objects and powerful energy stream manipulation via hand poses in order to create, hopefully, the fastest teachable jhana.

(Continued from LSD and the Siddhis.)

WetWaterDrop (a.k.a. James here on the blog) emailed me an update following his LSD trip. This is now the second time someone has ignored my advice to keep a stock of benzodiazepines (valium et al.) or, ideally, anti-psychotics, in order to terminate a bad trip if it happens — or even just to end an annoyingly long one. If you do not have sedatives to hand then you are really rolling the dice when you trip, as James found.

Robert Anton Wilson also recommends niacin (vitamin B3) to terminate a bad trip, which I have used to successfully end kundalini episodes but which I have not tested on LSD.

This is a longish trip report and my comments are at the end.

WetWaterDrop wrote:

I haven’t proof read this, just finished writing it, I’m kinda exhausted but wanted to put it together while I still remembered it all.

 

B. caapi + LSD

“Ayahuasca will bring you the experience she thinks you need, not necessarily the one you expect or desire.”

The only way I can describe this combination, based on my experience, is black magick.

This story begins a few months before the ingestion of this alchemy…

It starts with a Jaguar, the shaman symbol for drastic change.

A few months prior I ingested Ayahausca, the trip was mild with not much in way of noticeable effects. I’ve struggled with, at this point the idea of destiny.

I’ve been able to tune into the “source”, the source of creation of life will guide me, some might consider it a psychic phenomenon… Having this ability made me skeptical of free will. If the hand of god guides me, what’s the point of choice?

Is there choice? If there is why would you choose to do things contrary to the will of all things?

I wanted to experience my freedom, my sovereignty. I wanted the power to create my own experience and participate in a way I chose, not to be the pawn of a master plan but the king of my own.

When you take ayahausca, obedience to the plant mother is requirement. You listen and she speaks, she commands and you obey.

During this mild ayahausca experience, at one point I looked into the mirror, and my face shaped into that of an owls…

Later, I talked to the Jaguar – I wanted lessons, knowledge that I deemed appropriate for myself.

The jaguar recommended, since I desired so, make the demand of Ayahausca.

I did, and so the beginning of my journey begins.

 

Many months later I walked into my room, the light outside my window light up and I saw an owl sitting outside, I watched in fascination as the owl ate bugs, looked around and eventually flew off. During this time I remember trying to reach out and touch the owl with my consciousness. I thought it was so cool, that owl was so animated, so full of like and personality, I felt by just being allowed to watch it I had made a friend, I thanked nature for allowing me such a wonderful moment.

 

Anyway, down to the show.

I took the B caapi and LSD, I don’t know how much of either but I do know B caapi makes other things more potent.

I had a list of things written down I wanted to understand, it was as follows:

• Parana
• chakra
• Siddhi
• third eye
• Om
• Healing (I have a few phsycial injuries im still trying to work out)
• consciousness seperate from the body
• whatever the drug wants to show me
• The link between dreams, visualizations, and physical reality
• and rising above self sabatoge.

So those were the questions/experiences I had planned to get out of this trip.

I’m sitting at my computer sending out an email and everything starts to get real melty, like real real melty… I think “oh shit” I know this is just the start and it get stronger from here, I got tell my brother what I took as a just-in-case and tell him we should watch something humorous.

everything is getting melty and I am starting to feel real nausea, that can be from the b caapi and it will pass but it may have been from the lsd too, either way I’m sitting on the floor and it starts to get bad, everything is topsy turny, melty, mixed in with extreme pain and nausea.

I was on my knees bow’d down and I had a vision, mother eye came and from a brief instant wrapped her hands on my face, I felt warmth and I went “Oh, shes here” and with that she disappeared.

I’d walk outside try to vomit, didn’t work, so I’d just drink lots of Gatorade and water and try again, still won’t work. I’m feeling panic and it lots of pain while everything around me is melting when I close my eyes I get vision of a shadow realm I can’t make sense of.

It gets so bad at some point I go outside and, kneel face first in the dirt begging for mercy.

about 20 minutes and lots of Gatorade later I feel the purge, its been 4 hours so far of this shitty nightmare and this is by far the worst purge I’ve ever had, I projectile vomit while standing getting regurgitated Gatorade all over my arms and legs. Once im done I feel like a savage, a wild animal, I prance around for a bit before going and taking a shower, things seem less melty and the trip seems to be subsiding.

I feel energized, still kinda nausea’s but I want to walk outside so I do, as I’m walking thoughts and images are racing I can’t really make out. At some point the thought of suicide bombers comes up then the thought of the victims, and they’re loved ones, etc… It was too much, too overwhelming all the emotions ideas and pains all mixed in this melty world.

I go laydown in my bed, turns out the trip isn’t subsiding, its ramping up and I’m trying to figure out how to make it stop, I’ve begged every deity, guru, etc… I know to intervene and its just getting worse. Pain, my mind body and soul are just wrecked with pain.

I start getting torn from this world into a shadow realm, a dark black mixed with dark purple, than I’d end up back here but barely back here, the shadow realm seems to hold my attention better than the physical realm does and that has me worried, I feel like I’m going insane, that I’m about to be a cautionary tale. Ripped back and forth between the physical and the shadow I consider calling an ambulance, then the thoughts of medics, police, etc… and that I’d for sure end in the loony bin dosed up on anti=psychotics until I die.

That last part didn’t seem so bad, sitting nicely in a facility taking my pills to make sure I’m not taken by this nightmare.

I get up, and lay down, and pace, and lay down, and get, just a whirlwind of confusion.

One time, while walking in circles, I felt my lower 2 chakras start lighting up, they improved in speed and started to fill with energy – I knew what that meant and I used every bit of will power to shut that shit down, a burst of energy in this state for fry my whole being.

I remember being impressed with this body, this mind, and soul… If I had 00.01% less will power, less desire to hang out, it would have been over. The flexibility and persistence, the toughness of the human machine/consciousness that is this person, to me at that time, came off as very impressive.

I put on some music and laydown… and here comes the peek of my trip…

I close my eyes and, my body, my cells are just spasm in pain, on one half of my vision are LSD lights playing and pumping to the music, on the other half are creatures and minions from the  shadow realm focusing on me and trying to pull me in.

I remember what my friend Ed said about healing my body, which is breaking down the sensations with awareness, I try to do that but I’m to mind fuck’d by this carnival nightmare.

Eventually the LSD and B caapi combine wholly in my visual field. They start as small dots and grow, they balloon up until they disappear and repeat the process. It’s thousands of court jester animal demons of chaos all growing, ballooning and dissipating. I focus in and start to follow one of these balloons from birth to death and find that when it dies I automatically switch to my breathing, and follow it, the breath takes me threw my spine and into my heart up into my head, where it starts to take me to the shadow realm, I resist and go back to the visions, repeating this process. The pulsation of these creatures co-inside with nausea I’m feeling, and If I accept the sensation fully I don’t feel pain, if I resist I do.

Then I get a message, a crystal clear message, two of them actually.

One was this is chaos, this is being separate.

The other as this is Karma.

Karma, that message was deep and profound. I knew I took B caapi and LSD, and that choice let me here and It was 100% my responsibility. But there was a depth the message, that karma was all of my cells, and even deeper than the physical plane. In fact we are here in the physical so we can work out karma.

physical limitations are a gift, not a hindrance. The rules are in place for our benefit, so we learn and evolve with a rule set that allows to with safety and consistency. Without those things you could be swept up by chaos and lost to the tides of eternity.

Then I felt the shadow realm again, normally it pulls me and it feels like it pulls from the left side, but this time it sort of softly, slowly creep’d up into my vision from the right.

This time I focused in on it, I focused on the middle of my vision and started ascending upward, while all these eyes of predator birds watched me from the shadows… up and up I climbed until I was no longer in the physical, but in a vortex of shadow being circles my predator bird eyes. Their were strings of dark purple energy and I started to follow them, I followed two of them until they met in a point and the realness of what happened next shook me to my core.

There was a giant crash, the sounds of breaking glass, my journey ascending was stopped as the face of the God Owl starred at back at me, an angry predator bird dwarfing me by a thousand times in size, it only lasted about 2 seconds but the breaking glass sound was that dreams cape shattering, it call broke and shattered before me and I was back in the melty physical world.

Looking back, the owl stopped me from going too far.

Everything is still melty but I’m having a sense it might be ok.

So far this experience has been so bad I’ve redefined bad. My attitude towards life has always been very cavalry, as my mother once said I’ve never had a healthy sense of fear. I use to think I already had my worst drug experience and that was when I mixed DMT and DXM and felt the universe on the brink of extinction. What I’ve learned since is if you think its the worst thing it isn’t.

In order for it to be the worst thing you have to have the hope it will get better and the despair that It can worse from here still.

I’ve laughed off just about every single bad experience in my life, which I have lots. This time, this time my body didn’t feel like laughing… or so I thought… but I felt it, the sensation… the feeling in the bottom of my spine of a laughter… of a “I’d do it all again”… I had a moment of clarity, as tough and resilient as nature made this person that I am, hes out of his goddamn mind.

I lay down and put on some Sadhguru videos, hes my favorite Yogi and I’ve come to cherish his wisdom. I check his channel every day and there hadn’t been a video that morning but now there was a new one:

That seemed to sum my lesson, the synchronicity of the universe is very real.

By time I came down from the trip I felt violated, my mind body and soul were all exhausted, like I’d been beaten up and raped in a parking lot.

Its two days later that I’ve written this, I woke up and my bodies still has the shakes and im exhausted.

What I took away from this is hard to put into words, how I feel now. I realized that every action has a reaction, on the physical dimension and else ware. I also have a strange since of sovereignty and personal responsibility. A deeper understanding of karma, if you will… again hard to put into words.

Looking back that was a traumatizing, hellish event to go through, but me being me, it seems… I don’t seem to mind, and I feel like that should bother me.

Okay, well that sounds like a disaster.

Thoughts:

• The B. caapi sounds like a mistake. LSD is already orally active – that drug would have added a hard edge to it. It probably amped up and prolonged the nausea, too. LSD can generate nausea but usually that passes after the first hour. It is actually better to take something pleasant/sedating such as tramadol or phenibut with LSD to take the edge off.
• Sounds like you treated LSD more like an ayahuasca trip, searching for external visions and walking around etc. LSD is all about internal insight, and trips are best lying on a bed in a soothing atmosphere. LSD is also about revealing the subjective nature of reality (“you” being “the creator” – it’s all the same thing; non-duality etc.) rather than external systems such as spirit guides etc.
• One’s ability to get the most insight and benefit from LSD is directly tied to one’s ability in concentration meditation. I recommend you attain a reasonable level in concentration meditation before tripping. Most of what went on sounds more like an inability to control the trip (LSD meditated on YOU rather than vice versa).

I have had very similar experiences to what you just described – but actually from just kundalini, and no drug in my system. It really is terrifying but there are benefits from such experiences – I hope they filter into your awareness over the next few weeks so you don’t feel this was unnecessary suffering.

For the record, I’ve only ever had pleasant trips on LSD (it does hit all the pleasure receptors) and so have most people I’ve asked.

As an educated guess, I would put your bad trip down mainly to the B. caapi.

“I’ve laughed off just about every single bad experience in my life, which I have lots. This time, this time my body didn’t feel like laughing… or so I thought… but I felt it, the sensation… the feeling in the bottom of my spine of a laughter… of a “I’d do it all again”… I had a moment of clarity, as tough and resilient as nature made this person that I am, hes out of his goddamn mind.”

You need to stop laughing it off. You need to see, with no uncertainty, that it is completely brutal and hellish – so you can truly decide to have something better.

You need to get to the point where you’re saying, “Well, no matter how bad things are, at least they aren’t as bad as THAT was” – sadly, it is only from such hell that true appreciation of the present moment can be born.

It is after such hell – being lost in the chaos of the cosmos – that one can begin to appreciate things like how nice the sensate world is. For example, before typing this, I looked out the window and saw a tree swaying in the breeze against a blue sky. I felt an opioid wash coming over me as I recognized the niceness in that scene. The purpose of hell is to illustrate the heaven we have here already.

By the way, the purpose of this Universe is to experience relationships. Thenceforth comes subject–object, causality as we know it etc.

WetWaterDrop wrote:

How did you ground yourself after your experience? During mine I had a small glimpse of hope that the drugs were going to wear off, and they did so I came down, but you didn’t have anything in your system to come down from.

Only thing I can think of is take a mud bath.

Cold baths/showers. Heavy foods. Masturbation. Walks in woods or other strong indicators of material reality.

Also, keep yourself socialized. Go to work. Get dug into routine.

Today’s question won’t make much sense unless you are acquainted with the Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness. Here are two summaries, both of which are worth a read:

• Deoxy.org
• Wikipedia

The following question concerns a point which is actually highlighted in the Wikipedia article:

6. The neuroelectric or metaprogramming circuit

Note: Timothy Leary lists this circuit as the sixth, and the neurogenetic circuit as the seventh. in “Prometheus Rising”, Robert Anton Wilson reversed the order of these two circuits, describing the neurogenetic circuit as the sixth circuit, and the metaprogramming circuit as the seventh. In the subsequently published “Quantum Psychology”, he reverted this back to the order proposed by Leary.

Edenist Whackjob wrote:

Illuminatus, what is the correct order of the sixth and seventh circuits? Excuse if this sounds aspergery, but in some cases third circuit nitpicks like this ARE actually valid. Antero Alli says that the lower circuits are the bases for the higher ones, so it’s kind of relevant to know whether Neuro-Electric is based off of Territorial or Symbolic. (Or is it?)

Cheers!

No, it’s a good question.

Excuse if this sounds aspergery, but in some cases third circuit nitpicks like this ARE actually valid.

They’re valid… to a third-circuit nitpicker.

One of the major points of Prometheus Rising is that reality is always modelled. Circuit III is the conceptual circuit, the one that models reality using concepts like the Eight-Circuit Model.

Models are always necessarily reductive (else it wouldn’t be a model). The Eight-Circuit Model is not excepted from its own rules. Each person who describes the 8CM adds his or her own biases to it — included its creator, Leary himself.

My point here is that there is no one “true” 8CM. Wilson had his reasons for swapping those circuits, and reasons again for swapping them back. All I can talk about now is my opinion, drawn from my own experience — a.k.a. “my Eight-Circuit Model”.

Antero Alli says that the lower circuits are the bases for the higher ones, so it’s kind of relevant to know whether Neuro-Electric is based off of Territorial or Symbolic.

Antero Alli likes symmetry, so he says they have to match up. That might just be one reason for why he said that.

I have Angel Tech here under my bed, but only read it once, years ago. However I’ve read Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology many times each. That in itself says something — that maybe I think Antero Alli is a bit of a hack. However I should probably give him another read before making a judgment. My recollection is that he was over-reliant on things like tarot and astrology, and ritual generally. It didn’t seem much to me like he had the relevant experience in the higher circuits to be writing about them. In short, I don’t really see him as being in the same league as Wilson or Leary, so wouldn’t actually put his opinion side by side with theirs.

So, now, we just have Leary and Wilson, with them in agreement about the order of the circuits except for Wilson’s departure in Prometheus Rising and with him then changing back to the original order in subsequent works.

Straight from my personal experience, I can say that I believe Leary’s original order is correct:

• Circuit VI is the Neuroelectric/Metaprogramming Circuit
• Circuit VII is the Neurogenetic/Morphogenetic Circuit

In my ancient forum writings, I discussed a concept which I called “the kinaesthetic” — generating and shifting the sensation of movement within my body — which I had found could be used to manipulate my own experience of reality in real-time. This is now more clearly understood as nerve current flows (a.k.a. kundalini) and therefore falls under the Circuit VI: Neuroelectric/Metaprogramming Circuit. I turned this on with concentration meditation (which followed just a few months after turning on Circuit V using MDMA). This era also coincided with the sudden appearance of telepathic abilities and the other psychic phenomena covered under both Leary’s and Wilson’s descriptions of Circuit VI.

Ability to manipulate nerve current flows eventually, after several years, culminated in a full kundalini awakening which I described here: Mailbag: Should you trust my advice?  One thing I did not talk about much in that post is that, during that kundalini awakening, and subsequent intense kundalini experiences, I also experienced past lives, the perception of standing as an observer to key events in history, elaborate DNA and fractal imagery, and a deep terrifying connection to the brutality of Nature here on Earth. This is all classic Circuit VII: Neurogenetic/Morphogenetic Circuit stuff.

So, my experience is that Circuits V, VI and VII proceeded from each other linearly as described by Leary. Additionally, another reason I think Circuit VI is the metaprogramming circuit is that you can do metaprogramming without needing neurogenetic experiences (of the collective unconsious etc.), suggesting to me that those are part of a higher circuit that reveals itself through metaprogramming.

My drug experiences differ a little to Wilson’s descriptions in Cosmic Trigger: I found that LSD is extremely Circuit VI (with not many Circuit VII characteristics), and that Circuit VII was bizarrely triggered by the dissociative Methoxphenidine, which gave me past-life flashbacks as an African tribesman and led to me developing my own sort of yoga based on animal forms. The books are correct however that ketamine is the trigger for Circuit VIII (as is the near-death experiences brought on brutally by kundalini awakening).

Concentration meditation and kundalini can activate all circuits without the need for drugs, with kundalini working the quickest but being far more terrifying.

A long story short, about a year ago I had a real gambling problem. I was doing a lot of LSD at the time, and would stay up for 18 hours straight, enjoying non-stop gambling, drug abuse and wanking. All in all, it was probably the best thing I ever did.

These experiences were all underwritten by jhana. I have known for some time that I have a talent for visual concentration meditation, meaning using a mind-made image as the object. This transposes onto gambling seamlessly. LSD just intensifies object-creation by about tenfold. Visualize the desired outcome, spin the reels, and it comes true before your very eyes. I was seemingly pulling money out of thin air, such as this disgusting £3140 GBP win — about $5000 USD — from a single spin:

As I already have Stream Entry, I can get access concentration just by resting my awareness on any object for a few moments. With the LSD in my system, I was slipping into second jhana in a matter of seconds, with the reels taking on a life of their own in my mind’s eye against a backdrop of fireworks and fractal geometry.

The visual jhanas are some of the most mesmerizing, beautiful and addictive jhanas available. It is well understood in concentration meditation circles that, the more pleasing the object, the easier it is to attain jhana on that object — and the more likely you are to want to come back to that object again, and again, and again — which hinders enlightenment through attachment to that state. Slot machine gambling provides extremely pleasing visual objects, plus the reward circuit activation required for jhana. Gambling objects are, in short, some of the easiest objects on which to attain jhana.

It is also understood however that, the more pleasing the object, the more one will want to cling to that object and its associated jhana state. This is one of many reasons why the breath is used for the purposes of insight — it is a neutral object. While capable of generating rapture and bliss, those factors are nevertheless easier to let go of in the breath, allowing more unattached states to develop. Visual jhanas on the other hand are stunning and highly compelling; vivid and vivacious, a galaxy within themselves.

By using visual jhanas of the slot machine reels, every time I gambled, I would win hundreds of pounds in a matter of minutes. This was always from stakes of no more than £2.

The problem however was GREED. The logic went something like this: “If I can make £500 from a £2 stake, what could I achieve if I bet a £10 stake?” I have this jarring memory of being ripped to the tits on LSD, ethylphenidate and a bottle of vodka, and being £6000 up, with my initials on the casino’s homepage on every leaderboard, having won all the small jackpots. Then I turned the stake up to £10, and next thing I knew I was about £7000 DOWN. That is quite a turnaround — and was money I didn’t have. In short, I fucked myself with my own cock.

Once you have attained Stream Entry, concentration practice usually ends up causing you to cycle through the Stages of Insight. It is basically automatic and difficult to avoid. Most of my wins were done in the Arising & Passing Away, a stage well known for the spontaneous arising of magickal powers. With skill, it is possible to keep triggering an Arising & Passing Away by repeatedly entering the second jhana. This is how I maintain a constant stream of wins, and I have done this publicly with witnesses, including somebody who reads this blog (and hopefully he will step forward and corroborate this story. You remember our joint jhana on the Baywatch machine, right? ).

The problem with greed, and turning the stake up to £10, is that it rubs up against my belief system. £2 is nothing to me, but £10 a spin seems a lot. Even though that is not logical, based on the wins I was getting on £2, that is the nature of belief systems — they are largely irrational. Once betting is no longer fun, the Arising & Passing Away blends seamlessly into Dissolution. This presents as a tangible drop in energy. Suddenly the wins are no longer happening, and the visualizations are difficult to make and are fuzzy. The spin cycles seem to be out of sync with your thoughts. You’re clicking the mouse, but nothing is happening except the money counter is going down. Then: Fear. There is a palpable adrenaline spike. Visualizations are rippled by fast vibrational currents and are basically impossible to control. The losses mount. You enter Misery. Then you feel Disgust with yourself. Thoughts on the nature of things begin, and the revolting pointlessness of it all. The mouse is tapped at angrily, almost losing intentionally to spite yourself. Then, futures begin to be pondered with thoughts of, “What if I actually DO get everything I want? THEN what?” A Desire for Deliverance from the whole nihilistic process arises — a yearning for release from the captivation of material things. Suddenly, an Equanimity is reached, with both wins and losses. The nature of reality is calmly perceived and accepted, and allowed to play out. The Equanimity phase is the other vipassana stage known for the spontaneous arising of magickal powers — but from a place of a calm allowing of reality to unfold as it wishes, rather than via the ostentatious “Devil may care” displays of the Arising & Passing Away. I remember playing two machines simultaneously, being £3000 down on £40 a stake, then suddenly hitting Equanimity. A voice said, “Everything is going to be cool! Everything is going to be cool!” Then I won feature on both machines, raking in £1500 each to recover the full £3000 in just a couple of spins. THEN I lost it all again — because everything is going to be cool man, no matter what, and winning and losing are just mental formations. Gambling while in Equanimity is very dangerous.

Fast forward a year, and a few days ago I received an email telling me that my BetFilter licence — the program that blocks all gambling sites on your devices — had expired. The sensible thing would have been to pay the thirty dollars (or whatever it was) and renew it. However, I was interested to see how nine months of daily jhana had affected my manifestation abilities, and instead went to the shop to buy a case of energy drinks and a bottle of vodka — and then settled into a very special night of non-stop gambling and masturbation.

My rule now is very, very simple: NEVER go above a £2 stake. I proceeded with my usual second jhana/ Arising & Passing Away system. The wins began amassing almost immediately and by the time I went to bed at 4am I was £500 up. I woke up with my head pounding, but happy, and basically lounged around in bed for most of the day. Then I had my usual cold shower which woke me up and got some kundalini flowing. While the gambling had been fantastic the night before, I was looking for something bigger to happen — something to affirm my magickal powers, and really to just blow my mind and give me an amazing experience. I loaded up Bier Haus, which is my favourite slot of all time.

I love Bier Haus so much. A year ago, while my friends would talk about football and load clips of goals on YouTube, I instead would watch videos of people winning big on Bier Haus. This game was my sport. Here is a fantastic video of an absolutely massive win:

The goal of Bier Haus is to get at least five women, starting from the leftmost column, and preferably the purple women as she becomes a “sticky wild” on the free spins feature. Five women unlock five free spins, and each additional woman unlocks an extra five spins. If every space on the screen is filled by a woman, that’s a total of 80 free spins possible. The free spins can also retrigger (by getting at least five women again during free spins), making endless winning a possibility.

This game is pure simple genius. You hardly ever win any prizes, but when you do, you win shitloads. Getting the feature is one of the toughest things in the world to do, because the odds are so ridiculously stacked against you. However, when you do get the feature, if you have even a couple of purple women (for the sticky wilds) then you are going to get a prize on every spin, making all the free spins pay out an absolute fortune. Getting the feature on this game is probably the biggest buzz I’ve ever got — better than sex, or even cocaine. The special noise it makes when you get a “Big Win” (screen filled with a good symbol) is amazing. The world just seems to stop, then that noise is made, then all the coins start flying out the screen as your bank balance skyrockets. Watch the video to see what I’m talking about — the machine makes the noise at 0:54. The guy goes crazy throughout, and this is the reaction I have to this game, too. I literally start clapping, screaming, and pounding the air with my fist. The “pint of beer” symbol is the wild symbol, meaning it substitutes for all symbols, and a purple woman makes a beer symbol stay on that spot throughout free spins. You are always hoping for streams of that beer symbol to come down and settle, and for the machine to make that special noise — it’s Heaven.

Anyway, I loaded up the game but didn’t play it quite yet. Instead, I stared at the image of the woman symbol — my muse, the one I hoped to fill the whole screen with — and got some access concentration on her. After about a minute of this, when I closed my eyes I could see an afterimage of the woman symbol. I went and sat on my bed with spine straight and feet planted on the floor for grounding. Hands were rested on my lap with thumb and forefinger pinched together to generate kundalini nerve current flows up the spine and into the woman symbol afterimage. In my mind’s eye, as jhana was attained, the afterimage began to become more and more lifelike, until it was a perfect mental recreation of the original symbol. Then, because I had been staring at a whole screen of symbols, afterimages of the other symbols appeared around it, with the outline of the computer monitor around that. So, my mind had generated a replica of the entire screen based on the afterimage. Then, I implanted the suggestion that ALL the symbols were going to turn into the woman symbol that had already been recreated in the centre — and waited. This is how you do visualization properly — you don’t “force” the object to appear, but rather suggest to yourself that you are going to see it at some point, then just kind of let it filter into awareness. It just drops itself in. Sure enough, all the symbols on the “monitor” just changed into the woman symbol.

Ordinarily, at this point, I would rush back to the computer and hit “spin”. But I didn’t, this time. I stayed with the miraculously-created mental picture of a screen filled with women and allowed it to climb me through the jhanas, to fourth jhana, where I stayed for several minutes before being called for dinner. This whole process took about 30 minutes. The fourth jhana is a highly absorbed, dissociated state with little awareness of the body. One’s awareness is firmly on the object but there is no rapture or delight — the object is just, very matter of factly, the object. This equanimous view of the object creates a kind of “reality reset” where commands are allowed to filter through to the “main reality” without prejudice. This is why attainment of the fourth jhana is said to be the start of the psychic powers (though those with natural talent exist who can conduct magick at lower states of absorption).

After dinner my friend came over. We had a few drinks and I showed him some of the other games. Then we went out, and I forgot all about the magickal night of gambling that awaited me when I got home. Instead, I had the total sense that the intention had been handed over to an old friend who was going to disappear and take care of everything for me behind the scenes. That is the real trick to manifesting desires — knowing that it is all going to be taken care of, and then relaxing into the present moment secure in that knowledge. If I had to train you in magick in one sentence, it would be what I just wrote.

The all-pervading equanimity generated by entry to the fourth jhana lasted the whole night, and I had a bloody great time seeing some old friends who happened to be out. I threw a couple of coins into the pub slots and won about £20. It was weird to feel physical cash in my hand following a win, and nice. I got a peri-peri burger from the vendor next door, which is really, really fucking good food. All in all, I would say I was just loving life at this point.

I got home, set the burger down, poured myself a vodka, and sighed. I loaded up Bier Haus and just smiled at it. No jhana, no forcing it. I pressed spin. Three purple ladies appeared, and two green ladies, giving me five free spins with three sticky wilds. The feature began, and a ton of beer pint symbols filled the screen, giving a massive initial win. I reminded myself to relax and just go with the flow, and that everything was going to be all right. Then, the whole screen filled with women (bar just two spaces), giving a massive 70 additional free spins. The vision had come true. Furthermore, one of these women was purple, meaning I now had four sticky wilds — and their positioning on the first three columns meant that every spin was going to be a win.

I have never felt so relaxed gambling. This was a rare moment where I knew that I was definitely, without doubt, going to be getting everything I ever wanted, every spin, for the next seventy spins. It took about fifteen minutes for the whole thing to play out, during which time my breathing depressed to the contented level of a heroin addict, save for the occasional “Big Win” noises and coins-flying-out-the-fucking-screen when my state would be more reflective of cocaine. Here are selected screenshots showing the progression of the feature and its winnings (sorry about the bottom being cropped off — I just used MS Paint, which is SHIT):

£1766.50 from a single £2 stake. I didn’t even jerk off. I just sat there thinking, “This truly was the best day ever.” And everything I ever wanted had just happened, right there, and I went to bed with a big smile on my face.

These truly are blessed times.

Charles wrote:

Hey man,

First of all I hope you’re doing well, and thanks a lot for sharing so much valuable info!

I have a couple of questions:

1. Do you still use the dark stuff behind the eyelids as a method to access the jhanas? Is the technique basically to stare at the darkness as if it were a kasina?

I’ve been meditating for many years using the breath, and it’s only with great effort that I’m able to get into soft jhanas (and mostly only up to the 3rd usually). 90% of the time I get very, very relaxed watching the breath and this leads to dullness after an hour or so.

2. How easy is it to master the hard jhanas using the dark stuff behind the eyelids as a meditation object vs the breath?

I’m starting to believe the breath might not be the best object of meditation for me. I’m normally very relaxed when I meditate and the breath just fails to get my concentration going. It puts me to sleep because it’s very soothing and hypnotic. I have no trouble staying with any object of meditation. No trouble at all relaxing naturally. No trouble with wandering mind, my mind is very calm. However my main difficulties are generating energy and not falling into dullness after 1-2 hrs. Anyway, I’m interested in what your thoughts are.

All the best,

Charles

Firstly, I believe all concentration meditation is a hybrid breath meditation. So, whatever your object is, in order to stabilize it you have to stabilize the breath into coherent patterns. Attention and the breath are firmly interlinked and interdependent. When using visual objects, the breath must be stabilized into a coherent rhythm which is then linked mentally to the image (your object). If you do kasina meditation, you will find that at certain stages the object moves in phase with the breath, basically proving what I’ve just said to be true.

In order to use the dark stuff behind your eyelids as a genuine object, you cannot just stare at it diffusely. This will lead directly into the kind of pseudo-sleep patterns you are experiencing (and I will talk about the problems with relaxation and hypnagogia in meditation shortly). Instead, you have to choose a circular surface area within the dark stuff behind your eyelids and draw a mental boundary around it. You then use your concentration muscle to force awareness to remain only within that circle (and this is a lot harder than it sounds, which is the whole point of concentration meditation — it is something out of the ordinary you are doing, which is difficult to achieve).

The breath will begin to be controlled in phase with the attention you bring to that circle. So, you might find that attention remains within that circle if you make the in- and out-breath flow into one another continuously and rhythmically (and this same pattern will show itself in any successful concentration meditation).

The concentration muscle in an action of the forebrain against the back brains. You will find thoughts trying to enter that circle as energy patterns (which is what thoughts are before they become differentiated into verbal chatter and imagery). The concentration muscle is that part of your awareness you use to repel those energy patterns back as soon as you detect them incoming, thus driving them away before they become thoughts. That’s right — you must intercept thoughts before they become thoughts, and this is achieved via mindfulness of energy patterns attempting to arise at the periphery of the object which are attempting to enter awareness. You will find that your breath automatically modulates during this “push back”, and that the more coherent your breath flow, the fewer thoughts will actually arise.

All these systems must be trained together. This is why concentration is so difficult. It is never a case of, “Just do this.” It is a completely active process requiring total dedication. Mindfulness must be maintained simultaneously of:

1. The breath and the breathing pattern that best creates concentration, and endeavouring to create these smooth and coherent in-/out-flows.
2. The object itself (in this case the patch within the dark stuff behind your eyelids you have chosen as your object).
3. The energy patterns arising at the edge of the object (from elsewhere in the brain) that attempt to penetrate your awareness field and become thoughts. These must be actively pushed back against using the concentration muscle (which gets stronger and stronger each time you are able to push something away).

If you manage to maintain all these factors consistently for several seconds, the first jhana can arise literally within those few seconds. (I am not saying I can do this every time — preceding mental and physical state are huge factors. However, I’m now pretty good at it.) However, in reality, as a beginner, you are more likely going to end up running through the system in clumps as you practise. So, you might look at the object for a bit, then lose focus. Then you might remember that the breath is important, so you work on making the breath more flowing and consistent for a bit, and notice that the object stabilizes as a result of that. Then you might get excited about the object suddenly stabilizing, and get all sorts of distracting thoughts about it (maybe along the lines of, “That feels good. Does that mean jhana is coming?!”). Then you might remember that you have to push those thoughts away using the concentration muscle, and start doing a bit of that, which helps the other two processes you have running.

Now, there is a reason why, in other posts, I have advised against doing 1-hour sits for concentration practice for beginners who cannot yet attain the first jhana reliably. This reason is that the above process is very mentally taxing and can typically only be maintained for 20 minutes or so. (Things become a lot simpler once you can get the first jhana, since the meditation tends to “run itself” after that and actually requires less mental effort.) So, I believe you are better off throwing everything you’ve got at the object — utilizing all the factors of mental control I just described — for 20 minutes. If you don’t get at least some of the jhanic factors (rapture, bliss, one-pointedness or equanimity) during that time, you probably aren’t going to get much further after that, since much of your mental reserve has already been spent.

I will say again, however, that if you DO manage to get all the processes (breath control, concentration muscle, and attention on the object) working together in a stable way, then this is called access concentration, and first jhana could arise at any moment. Like I said, if you can maintain access concentration in a very stable way, first jhana can arise after just a few seconds. I think the people who say, “You need a few minutes in access concentration for the first jhana to arise”, are perhaps only maintaining access concentration with a 50-75% stability. That’s okay — there is a momentum built within access concentration that stays even if you lose it for a few moments. But this is the reason why they need that extra time. If you can really get the three processes I described working strongly in sync with each other, then you can hit first jhana very rapidly.

And then you have things like kundalini, hatha yoga, and pranayama you can use to generate the focused energy required for very fast jhanas, and I will talk a bit about that in a moment.

But to close off your question about using the dark stuff behind your eyes as an object, I will say a couple of things. No, it is no easier than a standard breath meditation, since breath control must be very high whatever the object of concentration. Also, the dark stuff behind your eyes is quite a strange object to use in terms of outcome. If you use a flame afterimage, you already know that the vision will progress through predictable stages — such as it collapsing to form a red dot, then a white star, then the white star pulsing in phase with the breath, then noticing the fractals in the edge of the star, and then eventually experiencing geometric patterns and total jaw-dropping universal imagery if your concentration is high enough.

With the dark stuff behind your eyelids, however, there is very little set pattern. It is basically pure potential energy. It is similar to white noise. If you listen to white noise long enough, you may start to hear voices in that noise. That is your mind projecting itself onto essentially a random field of potential. The dark stuff behind your eyes is very similar. If you do manage to stabilize it to a flat circular “screen” that you then hold in awareness, all sorts of things can then be projected onto that screen. I have had precognitive visions suddenly appear, and even a demon one time. Sometimes I have had faces of people I know suddenly appear, in what seems to be telepathic clairvoyance of their activities (though I have not been able to confirm any of these visions up to this point). Sometimes the visions are just garbage, such as scenes or objects that appear to just be the mind making sense of what’s going on, similar to a dream. When these visions “filter in” they tend to do so very spontaneously, like a shimmering clear image suddenly appearing in the surface of a lake. I have found this to be consistently jarring (and therefore difficult to maintain concentration upon), though simultaneously it can be very interesting.

I believe the “dark stuff behind your eyelids” object is very hard to use and even more difficult to master. However, I did use this meditation object almost exclusively for the first year I did jhana — which was before I knew what jhana even was. So it is certainly possible.

I’m starting to believe the breath might not be the best object of meditation for me. I’m normally very relaxed when I meditate and the breath just fails to get my concentration going. It puts me to sleep because it’s very soothing and hypnotic. I have no trouble staying with any object of meditation. No trouble at all relaxing naturally. No trouble with wandering mind, my mind is very calm. However my main difficulties are generating energy and not falling into dullness after 1-2 hrs. Anyway, I’m interested in what your thoughts are.

I think the problem goes something like this: Here in the West, we have this idea propagated through TV, magazines, book and films, that meditation is “sitting down with your eyes closed relaxing and trying not to think.” It is the impression that meditation is basically zoning out in a largely passive process. I would say about half of all the emails I receive from beginners are based on this fundamental misrepresentation they have that meditation is somehow about “relaxing”.

It is total crap.

Now let’s compare this impression to actual Eastern yogic meditation. First they do hatha yoga to create coherent energy patterns within their body — streams which can then be directed into their minds for meditation. Then they do pranayama breathing to further coordinate these energy currents into highly refined streams, while simultaneously training the breath for concentration. Then they do kriya (kundalini) yoga to cleanse their chakras and further prepare all aspects of body and mind for meditation. Then, they practise raja yoga (concentration meditation), channelling all that super-refined, highly potent energy through their object (e.g. the third eye) in a totally active, totally conscious, and totally intentional way, to create a state of samadhi (jhana).

Is there anything “relaxing” in that process?

I have caricatured that somewhat to make a point (but not much). There are Eastern meditations, such as Buddhist anapanasati, which are more aligned with the Western idea of “relaxing meditation” — but it is still highly active in terms of how attention is directed, and I do not want this point to be lost. Samadhi/jhana is also somewhat physically relaxing but is highly mentally energizing. Any kind of true concentration meditation practice is totally mentally active and is nothing to do with “tuning out”.

In my post Mailbag: Generating Piti and Sukha on the Breath, if you saw me do that you would not think it is relaxing at all. It requires forceful circulation of breath and intense focus within the bridge of the nose, and I can attain jhana sometimes within seconds using that method (after which I do appear to “relax” physically, but mentally I am very active).

I think for people struggling with what is basically falling asleep during meditation, you could do well to go in the opposite direction: Instead of relaxing yourself, stimulate yourself. Pranayama breathing, especially kapalbhati, is an extremely useful way to generate stimulating energy streams, I have found. Practise kapalbhati for a couple of minutes, then throw that generated energy at the object in the form of attention. It is far easier to generate the rapture and bliss feelings through stimulated energies in this way (as opposed to sedated energies, i.e. relaxation), and these feelings can be “run with” all the way to jhana by tuning into them while maintaining attention on the object.

Hope that helps!

Adrian wrote:

Hello,

I recently bumped into your blog. Its really amazing and I want to thank you for your walk and sharing from experience so much.

I still have a lot to read here but I want to ask you a question, Ive been “meditating” for 20 years and even though I ve gained benefits from my practice, after reading you  I realize that I kind of stayed in an early stage and was happy there. I am here to move on.

My question relates to a deep chronic tensing of my perineal muscles, Ive tried many things in order to try and release that constant clenching. Its not there all the time, it always appear when Im talking to someone and at other moments. Its as if I would clench my fist and keep it like that for a while.

Ive tried to bring awareness in to the area but i cant pass through. I hope I am being clear with my words. SO Id like to ask if you can give me an advice in order to  help me contact with and hopefully realease once and for all this tightness. I am sure there has to be some kind of emotional component but no matter how much catharsis i go through or emotional release , it changes nothing here.

MAybe you already wrote about something similar or that can help in this way so please , can you point me in a direction i can investigate or a practice you think may help??

Thank you again for the guidance you offer in your blog.

Blessings!!

Hi Adrian,

What you’re describing is a standard fear/anxiety response, common with social interactions. There is an emotional/psychological component — in Buddhism this is called a “formation”, and will be a mindbody impression of danger concerning that interaction. Formations are combined sensory, body and mental object impressions. In certain stages of meditation progress they can be perceived with great clarity.

The solution is to purge the formation entirely. You have to perceive the sensations clearly that make up the tightening response, along with the sensations of the mental object (the situation you are in that is triggering it). Together, all these sensations are a “formation”, and they are a whole. So, cause and effect does not exactly apply in the traditional Western way. So, it is not, “He sees X, and his brain interprets Y, and his body does Z.” It’s more like: it all happens at once and is a formation. And the formation is made of sensations. Typically, clearly perceiving those sensations tends to neutralize them.

The reason I am telling you this is is to outline the problem so you can understand my solutions.

See, the traditional Western approach would be to do talk therapy and discover the root of the fear and the quest for social acceptance yada yada yada and hope that that somehow causes the response to disappear. Of course, this basically doesn’t work at all, since there’s a lack of acuity in perceiving the sensations. (This is not to say talk therapy is useless; it isn’t. It just works in a different way, namely by providing a positive and accepting social bond.)

You have probably also tried bodywork approaches: work with the body response/ muscle and hope that there is a trickle-in into the mind side of things. This was my approach for a long time. It can have some effect, but mainly you end up working with gross sensations (“release this muscle”) and it’s not fine enough at all.

The solution is to do everything all at once by seeing the whole damn thing as a formation and fizzling away the formation. However, this does require significant meditative training and very high-resolution awareness of all the sensations that make up the formation (both mental and physical, which it turns out are actually the same substance at the sensate level). It also certainly requires the ability to slip into some interesting altered states (which are pretty normal for high-level meditators). The benefit of the formation approach is that the method for dealing with a formation works on ANY formation — including “pleasant” ones like addictions. The story of Buddha sat meditating beneath the tree while the Ten Armies of Mara attacked him is a story of formations, and the Buddha clearly perceiving and meditating through those formations in order to neutralize them.

I will now describe three methods I know of of dealing with formations, using your problem as the example subject. Please note that while these types of meditation are thought of as different, in my opinion they are all really just different paths converging towards the same destination which is the perception of and neutralization of formations.

– Kundalini. My preferred method. Intentionally trigger the formation, by entering a situation that causes it. Then either 1) get a good memory snapshot to retrigger it later while meditating, 2) walk away and do the meditation immediately on the fresh formation, or 3) do the meditation right there in the situation, which can be difficult if you are talking to someone at the time but with skill is definitely possible.

While the formation is active, send a broad stream of “up” energy from the ground up through the body. Notice that as it passes through there are tight areas. These are the physical aspects of the formation. The up-stream is acting like an interference pattern to reveal the formation. Now pass the stream through the blocks. The main issue here is that the stream must be made of ultra-fine particles in order to reveal the most subtle parts of the formation, otherwise there will be unpleasant resistance (although, generally, even a poor version of this exercise works better than doing nothing). The mental side of the formation is also dealt with during this process, which is harder to describe in words, but basically the mental is just ultra-fine physical sensations (mindbody nonduality). In about 50% of meditations I will personally get visuals of the karmic causes of the formation while this purge is going on, which are often logically nonsensical and seemingly have little connection to the current situation (which is why psychotherapy based on logical, linear connections is often useless — the mind is very broad and thematic). Continue the purge (the up-stream) during the visuals. Once purged properly, the formation will never return. However, understand that “social anxiety” (for example), is made of many formations and must be dealt with in many passes, though typically each pass will help the other linked formations as they are all interdependent.

I have personally eradicated 95% of my social anxiety using this exact method (and I’m just finding new ones to annihilate now; but the bulk of the work is done, meaning I am hardly ever anxious). Rapid progress can be made even in just a week, since many of the formations grow from the same root, and pulling out that root purges anxieties you thought were different but were all fundamentally connected.

Please note though that this type of practice probably takes years to develop since it requires both high acuity for sensations (which insight meditation trains) and ability to generate stable kundalini streams at will (and maintaining such streams as semi-independent objects is more a concentration meditation skill). I have a kundalini guide coming out soon which describes this practice, so watch out for that.

– Insight meditation. Probably a lot of training is required to be able to accurately perceive the sensations that make up the formation. You wrote: “Ive tried to bring awareness in to the area but i cant pass through.” The issue you are having is a lack of the high resolution required to really penetrate the block. To be honest, this takes a very long time to master. But, the time is going to pass anyway, and if this is your main issue, it is as good as any other to crack. Basically, you need to turn that awareness into an ultra-fine comb, passing through that locked muscle until your awareness can perceive every micrometre of it (here is a tip: nerves are far more important than muscle, and even nerves will eventually be resolved to just “sensations”, too). This will probably take months. If you just did that, however, you would likely gain all the insight required to solve your problem, seemingly “by itself” without requiring logical analysis.

Typically, the accurate perception of the sensations within that “block” is enough to simply negate it. So, just having true awareness of it often just causes it to vanish. This is a gateway to witnessing the full formation, as the mental side will likely begin presenting itself too.

I personally did insight meditation on an ankle injury which led to a hologram-like visual of the inside of the ankle. This also cured the injury (and hurt like hell while I was doing the “scan”).

– Concentration meditation. If you do pure concentration practice and get an intensely blissful jhana, then immediately enter the situation that usually bothers you, you will most likely find that the “formation” doesn’t even trigger. So, you wouldn’t even get the muscle tension that bothers you, or any of the connected urgent thoughts. They just wouldn’t arise. The mental state would be so altered that you would coast through the situation as though walking on a cloud. It is like personality transformation when this happens. Jhana is totally useful this way, though effects tend to be somewhat temporary. In that sense, you are basically suppressing negative formations from arising for some time after the jhana. By doing this often, there will be an eventual “pruning back” of the negative formations since, if they fail to arise so many times, they eventually die off.

On another occasion, after jhana, the negative formation might trigger but you might find you can now clearly perceive it and it is met with a lot of equanimity. Concentration meditation improves acuity of sensations by connecting them to the reward circuit (pain plus pleasure equals equanimity) meaning you do not recoil from the formation and can therefore begin standing to experience it, which changes its nature, usually permanently. This is a precursor to the formation being entirely witnessed and it disappearing forever.

In practice, all three types of meditation I just named invoke each other. The kundalini method uses concentration to maintain a kundalini stream, and insight to penetrate the formation. The insight meditation is powered by kundalini and uses “up” energy to neutralize the formation upon its witness. The concentration meditation uses positive kundalini in the same way, which ends up highlighting the formation and allowing insight to occur.

So, where do you go from here? I’ve given you a lot of information but not a lot of “do this” advice. Well, if you pursue any of those paths with a lot of diligence then you will almost certainly solve your problem. You could start however by running your awareness through your block a thousand times till you get that high acuity I spoke of. Things will reveal themselves to you during this process — you will gain insight, on the experiential level which cannot easily be put into words but which leads to a sort of intuitive “knowing what to do”.

Sorry, there’s no quick fix. What you’re describing is the essence of the human condition — knowledge of problems, but lack of knowledge of how to solve those problems. Most people just deflect them and blame someone or something else, which immediately causes the formations to propagate and reflect back and arise again and again and again in what then become predictable cycles. Be glad you are looking to annihilate these formations instead of sending them back out into the world.

The solution is to learn the meditative methods, since if you can crack one problem using them you can then crack absolutely any other problem that presents itself, since all these problems are the same fundamental thing: formations.

Regards, Edd

Note for readers: The kundalini guide is mostly written. I’ve got to make some graphics for it which is time-consuming, and set up the members area. Then the guide will be sent to a couple of members (who I’ve already nominated) for review, then I’ll release it. Next couple of weeks, tops.

This is a reply to Mayath’s comment which has now become so long as to justify a new post.

Mayath wrote:

You’ve been very helpful so far :). Your Kundalini method has been so useful to me. I’ve basically used you site as a place to rant and whine about weird shit anyway :).

“Almost all my meditation experience is tied up in insight”.

Insight has just been a side effect of my concentration work and was never my goal. It’s just been one of the rewards. I personally believe concentration to be the faster, more effective route because I’ve sped through the Dukka Nanas and developed the first four Jhanas pretty quickly in the scheme of things.

I might be developing a little too quickly because I’ve been extremely up and down and I think this put a lot of strain on my body. 4th Jhana has really saved me. The danger of concentration might be going too quickly. But I don’t think that’s a problem for most people, considering how tough some find it.

It’s interesting how we’re probably in similiar territories now but have used very different systems to get there.

On concentration:

I dunno, your concentration seems pretty strong to me but maybe that’s because you’ve been using the Kundalini streams as your Jhana method. You wouldn’t have those things without strong Concentration. Maybe you naturally have a lot energy or Piti and it’s why manipulating energy came so natural to you. I can hit Jhana rapidly playing with Kundalini but it took me a lot of concentration work to locate energy.

I don’t tend to use Kundalini as a Jhana source because I can go deeper with the breath.

Your posts about Jhana before you discovered Kundalini seem to match up with very soft Jhanas or what I would term either Whole Body Jhanas or at the lite Jhanas, using Culadasa’s lingo. First and second Jhanas in some of those posts like the breathing in pleasure one, correspond to what would be my access concentration now.

To be honest I have very high standards for Jhana and access concentration. I roll my eyes when I see crap like someone thinking they can achieve them in two months with 15 minutes. If there lucky they get get a sprinkle of Piti and think there Absolutus.

Once a certain amount of unification of mind has developed alongside Piti, it doesn’t really matter what method you use to get Jhana. Focusing on pleasure is good for beginners learning to taste Jhana but the harder Jhanas only come with time. I’ve hit Jhana using Kasina, Metta, choiceless awareness and Kundalini. I have the concentration so the method is irrelevant.

It’s not the sweet smells or tastes that bother me. I enjoy them. It’s the extremely powerful energy that I have access to. Its not Kundalini awakening level of power. But it has lead to me feeling nauseous, achy and with loads of pressure. Your kundalini energy method has been a great help in directing energy along with Emotional Freedom technique where you tap accupture points. I’m through the worst of it. I’m just wondering how long the Grades of Piti development is meant to last because it’s been really drawn out and I can’t find any journeys similiar to mine.

Hopefully Piti/energy will settle down soon.First and second Jhana are just too intense and extreme for me to spend too much time in. I feel like I could explode and take my whole neighbourhood with me.

I’ve been meaning to ask you about those old posts about attaining Jhana in public actually. I can do it too but it just make me seem stoned and unable to socialise properly. Too intoxicated. I’ve tried using it to improve my skills but I haven’t got very far yet. I get too absorbed in the pleasantness of the Jhana, when really what I want to do is be focusing better at what I’m doing.Not getting high. The dream is to be able to use Jhana to rapidly learn new skills. I’ve improved my video games skills but nothing else. Early days yet though.

The hard Jhanas are more about time than anything else. You have to have the Body pacified enough that you can sit for hours in access concentration without going into Jhana. I find ignoring Piti the hardest thing here, not the concentrating.Sukha(bodily bliss) comes pretty easy to me so I can sit for hours if I want. I barely feel my body if I so choose. For me to hit an extremely hard Jhana, I gotta wait till the light behind the becomes a bright light and it sucks me in.

There’s a relationship between the Fourth Jhana and brightness of mind but I haven’t fullyfigured it out yet. Hitting Fourth Jhana seems to be an access point though. It’s a sign you can move onto deeper Jhanas. For example, If you can hit a soft Fourth Jhana consistently you now have the concentration to hit a hard first Jhana. Same with the extremely light whole Body Jhanas. When you hit Fourth in them, you can move onto the soft ones.

TMI should help youbut the later stages are more insight focused, which you’ve alreadygone very far in. You might find it useful to work on developing concentration without trying to hit alternate states of consciousness too.

I hope you post your thoughts on TMI. The early parts of the book might not have much practical use for you apart from maybe helping with your teaching. But the interlude chapters and the chapters on stage 8 or beyond should be very useful to you. I’d peg you being around stage 8 or 9.

Pa Auk Sayadaw has the hardest criteria for Jhana out there. You should look him up. I don’t know if his Jhanas can be attained consistently outside retreat conditions. Here’s a good book but it’s not very useful if your not on retreat. https://www.amazon.com/Practicing-Jhanas-Traditional-Concentration-Meditation/dp/159030733X

You might find a free textbook by him somewhere online. One of my future meditation goals is to go on a long retreat and achieve his Jhanas.

I’ve only briefly tasted Off World Jhanas and I’d hesitant to talk too publicly about them because what I’ve experienced just sounds like lies or mania. I definitely wouldn’t say anything about them in real life.

I don’t know if I would guide someone into having those kind of experiences. There extremely ungrounding. My Mind feels extremely powerful after coming out of them and if I had any of the Siddhis cultivated, I could do extreme damage. Extremely hard Jhana seems to grant free Siddhis.

I experienced the perfect music Siddhi after coming out of one. Every sound seemed heightened and even normal sounds like my breathing seemed to contain a perfect orchestral sound that I could hear in my mind. Everything sounded so rich and beautiful. Songs were just hanging in the air waiting to be plucked. My dreams has songs better than Mozart. If there are Gods, that’s what they listen to.

I really regret not being able to play an instrument because if I could cultivate that Siddhi I’d easily become famous.Unfortunately it faded away when I woke up.

I don’t know if such things should be spoken about publicly. I’m sceptical of myself because it could be just classic Mania, The difference from Mania is that I sober up quickly and I feel clearheaded. I’m not acting like a crazy person in real life. I just come off as relaxed and happy. These states are extremely conductive for creativity because you feel some mind blowing shit.

Another experience I had, was that my mind felt like a bright light. That experience has stayed with me and has deeply moved me. Briefly it felt like I could sense the “aura” or see what the colour of other minds looked like. A lot of minds just look dirty, clogged with blackness, with bits of coloured light like pink, red or green trying to break through the black. But I had a deep sense that the mind is meant to be bright and white.

Crazy shit. Going mad is very fun :).

I will now break down and reply to bits of this.

I dunno, your concentration seems pretty strong to me but maybe that’s because you’ve been using the Kundalini streams as your Jhana method.

I’ve only been using kundalini for the last year. Prior to that I used almost exclusively the “sweet breath” nose bridge concentration and kasinas. And I did those for years without even knowing about the jhanas. The reason I learned about jhana “by myself” is that it was necessary for me to learn a technique in order to feel good. Without jhana (or drugs) I hardly ever felt good. So I did what I later learned was jhana literally all the time. One-pointedness and “sweet breath” was literally the only way I could feel good (outside of addictions), so I did it all the time. That’s sad, and illustrates something bad about my upbringing (being completely unprepared for the world), but on the plus side I had to learn strong concentration out of necessity, and have independently discovered much of this tech so I can now describe it using new metaphors which will help certain people learn it quicker (and what I have realized is that often the key thing that allows someone to learn a tech is the metaphors you present to them when describing it).

You wouldn’t have those things without strong Concentration.

Regarding my kundalini meditation, creating the persistent illusion of a stable, upwards-flowing energy beam which appears to exist of and for itself is indeed 2nd jhana minimum, since 2nd jhana is required to create stable persistent objects requiring no further effort to maintain. For this reason I would also say 2nd jhana is the start of magickal ability (not 4th as is typically claimed) because that is the minimum required to create stable independent thoughtforms, such as intended reel configurations on a gambling game, that get sent off into the universe in order to repeat at a later time.

I don’t tend to use Kundalini as a Jhana source because I can go deeper with the breath.

To clarify, I am not looking for depth with the kundalini meditation. When I created it I was looking for something that could be instantly produced in order to investigate and annihilate formations (of which negative thoughts, emotions, and pain, are a subset) in real time without the preparation required for deep jhana states. It is a completely functional meditation that can be done anytime, anywhere, at a moment’s notice, when things like anxiety strike. Destroying an anxiety formation basically removes it from future timelines — meaning permanent removal. I have removed more anxiety with that meditation than I ever thought possible. I came to quickly understand why kundalini awakeners refer to its purging power as “burning off negative conditioning in the fires of kundalini”. Particularly when first awakening, kundalini is EXTREMELY hot and fiery, giving visual illusions of heatwaves in the air.

My kundalini jhanas are very soft 1st-4th jhana, with me being able to reach functional soft 4th jhana within a matter of moments if I have already practised that morning, and with the basic functional equanimity of soft 4th jhana. Again, depth was never the intention — functionality was.

By the way, in my experience, kundalini is the energy that powers concentration, so when anyone is developing concentration they are necessarily increasing kundalini. I believe all the meditation styles eventually converge and they are different routes to the same phenomenon. Your aches and pains sound very much like kundalini rising.

Your posts about Jhana before you discovered Kundalini seem to match up with very soft Jhanas or what I would term either Whole Body Jhanas or at the lite Jhanas, using Culadasa’s lingo. First and second Jhanas in some of those posts like the breathing in pleasure one, correspond to what would be my access concentration now.

Yes. I model the jhanas as being fractally stacked within each other. So soft 1-4 could correlate with or be a precursor to hard 1st. Even access concentration has levels within it. There is a moment when access concentration becomes stable after a shaky start, mirrored in the same way first jhana also has a “maturation period” during which it stabilizes. One of the benefits of this model is that it explains and reconciles all the arguments you see online about whether someone has “hard” or “soft” jhana or whether someone “really has jhana or not”. The truth seems to me that there are levels within levels and ultimately you can go as deep or shallow as you want, but that as you go deeper the levels progress in the same fashion with each successive layer attained.

I’ve been meaning to ask you about those old posts about attaining Jhana in public actually. I can do it too but it just make me seem stoned and unable to socialise properly. Too intoxicated.

To become better socially, an equanimous jhana should be reached earlier in the day, long before you go out. Then you should make formal intentions immediately after the jhana. Good intentions are, “I will be open to new possibilities”. For socializing you need to create an outwards-facing viewpoint which seeks connection to desirable situations. You should then go out and live that intention, without thinking about meditation work at all. It is a fire-and-forget method. I had an absolutely brilliant New Year’s Eve last night doing exactly this. The equanimous jhana earlier in the day completely wipes the slate clean of formations/ negative expectations. The magick of equanimous jhana is that it wipes the slate clean and opens up new possibilities. Your night becomes a blank canvas, onto which events are then painted in line with the intentions you formally set about what you want to experience. You can install specific interactions you wish to have — bake them into the spell — or you can leave it entirely random if you want. You can literally install “surprise me” scripts into the spell. Then, you forget ALL about the spell and any meditation work, and go out and enjoy the night and experience the events as they unfold.

People are ALWAYS casting spells like this anyway, usually with low consciousness and lots of frustration (old formations which they should have annihilated prior to the night out). People’s nights out always play out exactly as they had them in their head beforehand. The reality that unfolds is exactly in line with their expectations prior to the events. So you should absolutely wipe the slate clean via equanimous meditation using whatever skill level you are currently at, then install new intentions for the night out immediately after the jhana. You do this by literally saying the words out loud (or loudly in your head), “I intend to experience X” or “I intend to be outwards-facing and open to new social connections” or whatever. You say this with force, and really mean it — then you forget all about it and go and live your life. Magick is all about forgetting it, then living it. You cannot experience something while being fixated on its outcome.

Inwards-facing jhanas while out are the death of socializing. It is just simple tuning out. Self-medication and dissociation. I really wish I had never put that stuff in the first jhana guide. What I just wrote is the actual way to do jhanas for good socializing, and it is completely based in magick/intention-manifestation.

There is room for public concentration meditation, and these are for very specific activities like 1) sport and 2) musical performance. Doing what you would deem a very soft jhana (which you could just call basic absorption) prior to a golf shot, for example, works in a binary fashion whereby if I do the meditation I then do a good shot, and if I don’t, I do a bad shot. I absorb into the very idea of the shot, including absorbing into a visualization of the intended outcome, simultaneous with absorption into the breath, and into the ambient sounds of nature, and then into the swing itself. The shamans call this “stopping time”. This was one of the kinds of “public jhana” I touched upon in the first jhana guide. Piti is developed, so is general equanimity, and a great mindfulness of where you are and what you are doing. It is absorption in the task following a visualization of a desired outcome. Good sports performance is nothing short of magick enacted in a flow state.

I get too absorbed in the pleasantness of the Jhana, when really what I want to do is be focusing better at what I’m doing.Not getting high. The dream is to be able to use Jhana to rapidly learn new skills. I’ve improved my video games skills but nothing else.

In my experience learning new skills is mainly about intention. You must choose a specific skill you wish to master that year and set hard formal intentions about it. And you must practise it diligently outside of meditation. People expecting to magically become good at something without practising it in “real life” are rather deluded in my opinion. I am not directing this at you, but I am under the impression that some people have read Absolutus’s posts and drawn the conclusion that skills can just appear via jhana without the physical act of practice.

That said, the unification of mind under jhana does allow one to consolidate the experience of that skill as far as you have taken it and draw new connections within it. Also, the visualization skills and magickal tinge acquired through jhana will rapidly accelerate success. Mastering a new skill is like gathering dirt to build a mountain. Jhana will make that process more efficient and give you ideas you wouldn’t otherwise have had.

The hard Jhanas are more about time than anything else. You have to have the Body pacified enough that you can sit for hours in access concentration without going into Jhana. I find ignoring Piti the hardest thing here, not the concentrating.Sukha(bodily bliss) comes pretty easy to me so I can sit for hours if I want. I barely feel my body if I so choose. For me to hit an extremely hard Jhana, I gotta wait till the light behind the becomes a bright light and it sucks me in.

Agreed. Very high-quality jhanas for extended sits require, frankly, huge preparation — both mental and physical — and tons of time and patience. I hardly ever do them. Like you said, the piti (rapture) is extremely distracting and alluring. I tend to latch onto piti at its earliest showing and ride that out. My meditation practice is basically lazy and slapdash. Have you ever met someone who had natural talent for something, but rather than putting in the time and effort to really develop that talent, they just ride along on it doing the bare minimum? And you just think, “Man, if I had that talent, I could do so much more with it.” Well that’s me with concentration meditation. One of my regrets is not putting sufficient time and effort into cultivating the jhanas properly before going into insight practice. I believe I would have had a much better time of things with better concentration practice to stabilize the process. I have had probably some of the worst Dark Nights imaginable as a result of not cultivating sufficient mindbody pacification.

I’ve only briefly tasted Off World Jhanas and I’d hesitant to talk too publicly about them because what I’ve experienced just sounds like lies or mania. I definitely wouldn’t say anything about them in real life.

I would love to hear about your experiences with the off-world jhanas. They don’t get talked about enough, in my opinion. I have had them maybe five times, and only a couple of those were intentional and required a lot of time and effort to attain (i.e. sitting for hours). I still don’t understand the tech well enough to get those states at will, which is the main reason I have ordered Culadasa’s book (The Mind Illuminated). The other three incidents occurred at the various peak moments during the 6-month unfolding of my kundalini awakening, and happened extremely suddenly while meditating and were basically flukes.

I will now describe the most profound of these incidents in the hope that you will also share some of your experiences.

When I first began to figure out that I could create very stable kundalini flows, I entered a “discovery phase” during which I would send these beams into various parts of my body in specific directions in order to find out what happens. This was completely interested playing, which is often ideal grounds for new wondrous experiences in meditation.

I created a sustained kundalini beam from possibly the solar plexus chakra to the root chakra in a downwards direction. To put this in context, this was a highly coherent, stable energy flow, maintained in that location at high intensity for several minutes. I had no idea what I was doing, and really should have had a teacher for this sort of thing. I was suddenly — VERY suddenly — propelled out of body into what I can only deem to be a Hell realm. It was a twisted form of my own home city, with desolated buildings and dark skies, more real than real, with gruesome zombies patrolling the streets. I magicked a handgun and just started shooting. There was total abject panic. A real jhanaic manifestation of the Fear territory.

I realized throughout this ordeal that I had maintained the downward kundalini flow. I reversed the flow and had it flow upward to my crown chakra instead. I must have passed the beam straight through my reward centre because I was transported instantly to a Heaven realm. I was now sat meditating beneath a tree in a beautiful garden. In the centre of my field of vision was a perpetual fountain of energy which spilled out symbols associated with great reward: candy, coins, gems, fruits, and, bizarrely, symbolic representations of luxury sports cars. These cars looked like the top-down views of the sports cars from the first Grand Theft Auto — two-dimensional symbols of cars like Lamborghinis rather than being actual lifelike cars. I’m not even into cars, so I don’t know where they came from. This fountain was perpetual and lasted for hours. All the time I felt the most high I have ever been. This was on a level one thousand times more intense than any drug I had ever taken, including LSD. The Heaven realm ended at a gold-plated brothel, looking much like the opera house from Battlestar Galactica, filled with the sweetest string chamber music. A madame brought out eight of the fairest, most impossibly gorgeous maidens (all blonde) and I disappeared into a room and enjoyed bareback anal with the most beautiful underage prostitute.

When I came out of that jhana, I knew something insane had just happened, and I was filled with the feeling that perhaps I actually knew very little about meditation. I spent the next two days stumbling around not knowing what was real and what wasn’t. I phoned my dharma friend (Aldous from this forum) and told him what had happened. He instructed me to eat the greasiest, stodgiest food and to go and get some fresh air. He might well have saved my life that day.

I tried to recreate this experience using kundalini beams in the exact same way about a dozen times, all unsuccessfully. These Heaven realms remind me of the Nexus from Star Trek: Generations. In that film Picard is transported to a place where his deepest fantasies are fulfilled:

This scene is quite well directed and captures some of the essence of the off-world Heaven jhana. Even the lights are very reminiscent of what one can find in these realms, with the Christmas tree with the glowing baubles being especially evocative of those states.

In that film, the antagonist played by Malcolm McDowell has spent time in the Nexus but was cast out in an accident. Now, he will do anything to get back there. This was how I felt while making all those unsuccessful attempts to get back to the Heaven realm, before finally giving up.

I don’t know if I would guide someone into having those kind of experiences. There extremely ungrounding.

I was teaching a student basic concentration meditation on Skype at the time, and after that experience I emailed him something along the lines of, “I’m not even sure I should be teaching you this stuff. Imagine a state one thousand times more intense than LSD and you will begin to approach what it is possible to experience through meditation. It is completely insane.” I was really shaken by it all.

My Mind feels extremely powerful after coming out of them and if I had any of the Siddhis cultivated, I could do extreme damage. Extremely hard Jhana seems to grant free Siddhis.

Well these realms just grant a temporary state of total unbridled creativity. You can do literally anything you want in those realms. You are omnipotent, and omniscient.

But I liken it to visiting the ocean but only being allowed to bring back one cup of water. The question is, how much of the siddhis and knowledge can you actually bring back with you into the “real” world? I believe you can certainly bring back powerful siddhis from these realms but to do so would require extreme intention and dedication, understanding and fully accepting that to do so would irrevocably alter the timeline. The main reason I believe we DON’T bring back siddhis willy-nilly is that those states of infinite creativity are our “natural” state and the physical world is something we have built for ourselves in order to experience limitation.

I experienced the perfect music Siddhi after coming out of one. Every sound seemed heightened and even normal sounds like my breathing seemed to contain a perfect orchestral sound that I could hear in my mind. Everything sounded so rich and beautiful. Songs were just hanging in the air waiting to be plucked. My dreams has songs better than Mozart. If there are Gods, that’s what they listen to.

I really regret not being able to play an instrument because if I could cultivate that Siddhi I’d easily become famous.Unfortunately it faded away when I woke up.

I have had the perfect music siddhi many times in my life. One time I leapt out of bed and, being a composer, tried to score what I was hearing. I couldn’t get it down fast enough and it never sounded quite like it did in my head. Then the music impression in my head began to fade and, while I can still hear it now, it is not as it was. Scoring such things in itself is a talent that can be fostered, however.

In Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson profers the idea that composers such as Beethoven reach up to the higher circuits and bring back “evolutionary” music, such as the Ninth Symphony.

Interestingly, I noticed during my kundalini awakening how much of nature is in Beethoven’s music. For example, there is a species of bird living near my house whose natural song is the opening notes from one of his symphonies. All lifeforms create and experience notes from the harmonic series. This sequence of frequencies appears to be something fundamental underpinning the universe. At the height of my kundalini awakening, the peak experience which defined it for me, I could hear the sound of “Om” (more correctly rendered “Aum” from a phonetic perspective) in all sounds in my environment. Much like in Battlestar Galactica when a certain character begins to hear music in his head, and starts shouting “It’s in the damn ship! The music is in the damn ship!”, the sound of Aum was present in all things. This was simultaneously terrifying and reassuring. I believe the Aum chant is simply a rapid moving through the notes of the harmonic series.

Another experience I had, was that my mind felt like a bright light. That experience has stayed with me and has deeply moved me. Briefly it felt like I could sense the “aura” or see what the colour of other minds looked like. A lot of minds just look dirty, clogged with blackness, with bits of coloured light like pink, red or green trying to break through the black. But I had a deep sense that the mind is meant to be bright and white.

I started tapping into this siddhi unexpectedly during a lot of drug-taking a couple of years ago, namely LSA, as described in this rambly post: How good is your IQdar?

I have had this state many times since then without drugs, and can tap into it semi-reliably using concentration plus intention to see those auras. Meditations on the crown chakra tend to evoke this siddhi. I am somewhat convinced that, should one wish, this could be cultivated to full-blown mind-reading, but that is not something I am particularly interested in doing as it brings with it a lot of problems. There is such a thing as “too much information”. In fact, one of the reasons I had such a good night out last night with lots and lots of happy socializing is that I intentionally suppressed my ability to look into others’ minds, instead choosing to take people exactly as they chose to present themselves to me. Ultimately, the fun of socializing derives from discovering the other person through interaction, and a mind-reading siddhi negates all that and will end up isolating you.

In any case, if everyone’s minds were bright and white, where would the fun be? That’s a rhetorical question. The human experience is based in duality and derives from the contrast between our thoughts.

Anyway, that’s enough on these subjects for today, I think. I would just like to say to you and everyone else who’s reading, thanks for being here, and may we all have a very Happy New Year!

In the last major post on concentration meditation, I had you fix your attention on a single point, the bridge of the nose, to the exclusion of all else, for sits of at least 30 minutes. This is not the whole story of how to reliably enter jhana, but I needed to give you something straightforward to do to begin stabilizing your mind. It is not an easy nor a pleasant thing, to sit there focusing upon a single point in spacetime, especially when you have been trained into constant distraction by television and Facebook — but it is necessary. Judging by the comments and emails I received, for a few of you this instruction was enough to reach jhana — and, in fact, it is enough, provided certain other conditions are fulfilled (which may occur by luck or by preparation).

This post however aims to take luck out of concentration meditation and is all about working with objects. This really gets into the heart of what concentration meditation is about, which is the creation of mental objects which appear to exist in and of themselves. So, for example, the breath can literally come to be seen as a wisp of smoke, a pulsing energy field, or a flowing river. It can become “seen-felt” — a phenomenon whereby the breath is experienced in a combined sensory modality of the feeling body and the seeing eye. Holding these objects in your mind will leave you dripping with ecstasy.

The Mental Breath

This phenomenon is the answer to the question, “What should I focus on when the breath slows or stops and sensations are hard to perceive?” This happens to just about every meditator, and is a question I receive often in emails and in the comments sections. In the previous post I was advising you to just maintain awareness on the bridge of the nose regardless. One suggestion was just to imagine that the sensations are still there, and to focus on those. This is the same as how if someone shone a laser pointer on a wall then turned it off you could still stare at that point even though the light had gone. At this moment your “object” is in fact an imaginary point in spacetime. It is as though someone gave you a coordinate to stare at, even though there was nothing at that coordinate. This is all good mental training. Concentration meditation is entirely about cultivating mind-made objects — even something as trivial as an imaginary point. Some people got jhana from that, which is completely possible if you mind becomes absorbed in that imaginary point.

As easier object to focus upon however is the “mental breath” — a name Mayath and I gave in some private emails to the following phenomenon. If you close your eyes now and breathe in, even with ordinary physical awareness on your body you should feel a kind of energy wave moving up you. Now, close your eyes again, and spend more time studying this wave — in and out, in and out. If you spend enough time just feeling this wave with each breath (say, a 30-minute sit), you will eventually begin to develop a mental impression of it. You can get to know it really well. You might start to get a visual impression of it moving through your body, expanding and contracting. Congratulations: You have just created a mental object. Now, even if you just sit watching this breath come and go exactly like this (which is called access concentration), if you can stay with it reasonably well you will eventually get a jhana.

This brings me to my first important point: Simply holding a mental object in awareness brings feelings of rapture and bliss, and eventually causes jhana to arise. We don’t know why it does; it just does. My theory is that the universe, at its heart, is a creative entity that draws satisfaction from experiencing its own creations. It operates in an infinite loop of: create→experience, create→experience, create→experience with each new iteration giving rise to a new set of possibilities for the next creation. Concentration meditation temporarily suspends the background noise of previous creations (a.k.a. “life”) and provides a space in which to create and revel in an object anew.

The initial phase, when you are holding the mental object in mind (in this case, the mental impression of the breath), is called access concentration. It feels good. Feelings usually rise quickly and suddenly. The initial feeling is usually one of elation or exaltation; this is known as “rapture” (piti). The time it takes for a full jhana to then arise is dependent upon:

1. How clearly and stably you are able to hold the mental object in awareness, and for how long in an uninterrupted span of seconds or minutes. So, if you get a mental impression of the breath for just a second, you will likely feel a rush of good feelings. This can actually cause you to lose the image, as can other distractions. Because you lost the image, you won’t cross the threshold into jhana. But if you can maintain that mental impression of the breath for longer, your good feelings will amp up and up the longer you hold it in awareness. The good news is that losing the object does not start you again from zero — the next time it will be easier to create and hold a mental image of the breath, the image will last longer, and the good feelings will be stronger. The longer you can hold this mental object in awareness, the more absorbed in it you are said to be. If you are able to hold an extremely clear, stable, uninterrupted impression of the breath, it is possible to enter jhana within seconds.
2. Your tolerance for the good feelings (also known as an increase in energy). So, this is training your mind and body to withstand an increased bandwidth of energy (perceived as rapture, glee and delight). If these feelings become too intense (which can be sudden), you should back off your attention a little from the object. Then concentrate again and the feelings will be able to go a little higher than last time. Eventually you will be able to withstand the energy level required to cross the threshold into full jhana, which is an event that will be fairly obvious when it happens. Jhana itself brings on additional feelings of deep bliss (sukha) which fill your whole being with peace and joy.

My second important point is: Even if physical breathing slows or stops, the mental breath can still be perceived. So, you always have a “breath” to place your awareness on. It is sensations that move through your body and mind as a flowing wave. Once you have developed a good mental impression of the breath from sitting and watching it in your practice, you can invoke the mental breath at any time: with eyes closed just imagine you are breathing in, and you should be able to perceive the mental breath flowing through you like an energy wash. I personally benefit from focusing on this energy wash flowing up through my nose and into my head. Now, when you sit to do concentration meditation on the breath, if physical breathing stops you can induce a mental breath and place awareness upon that instead. Interestingly, this usually causes the physical breath to start up again by itself.

This brings me to my final point: If you can synchronize your mental breath with your physical breath, this is a sign of strong absorption and you will find jhana begins to arise very quickly.

This concept of working with the mental breath alongside the physical breath is what Daniel Ingram is pointing to when he says the following in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (p.139):

If you are using the breath as an object, you might try purposefully visualizing it as sweet, smooth waves or circles that are peaceful and welcome. Try breathing as if you were in a garden of fragrant roses and you wish to experience the fullness of their fragrance. Perhaps these tips will help illustrate the kind of non-resistant and peaceful presence that can help one attain these states. Tune into sensations in and around the primary object that feel good.

Nursing the Breath

I believe the ability of a written guide to teach students how to enter jhana depends strongly upon the metaphors used to describe the technique. Metaphors are really important because they convey something emotional and perceptual which plain instructional words cannot do.

People respond in different ways to each metaphor. For example, all the Buddhist metaphors about making your mind “clear and bright like a full moon” appealed to me because I am very visual and poetic in my mind. (You can say stuff to me like, “Become the colour purple” and I would sit there and soon be bathing in the purple rain.) Other people however might not know what to do with that. Consider also Daniel Ingram’s metaphor above about visualizing the breath as “sweet, smooth waves”. Perhaps you could pick that up and run with it. I couldn’t, until I discovered the mental breath — then I could run with it, by making the mental breath flow like water up and over my head, rather than the physical breath. So, it’s not just the metaphors, but the order you teach them.

One of my goals is to give you lots of metaphors so that one of them will ring a bell within you and you will be able to do something with it. Also, by writing these out in post form, I can figure out which ones people are responding to well and use those more going forward.

The following metaphor is something I came up with recently after asking myself how I actually treat the breath in my mind to enter jhana. This is important because the style of attention you pay to the object is arguably the most important determinant of whether you will enter jhana (and the flavour of jhana you will enter, which is something you don’t need to worry about yet).

In the One-Pointedness post I had you affix your attention on a single point, the bridge of your nose. You may have noticed that if you went to the bridge of your nose very hard with your attention, then the sensations there would quickly vanish. It is like grasping at sand and having it slip between your fingers. This is because, in general, when you push attention on something, attention fatigues quickly and the object appears to fall back or disperse. The solution here is to pull your attention back a little just before this happens. So, you go towards the object, then back off just before it disperses. Backing off too much however will cause the object to vanish — so, the second half of the trick is to then put attention back on the object before this happens. Thus, you establish a rhythm of “towards, away, towards, away” in which the object is not allowed to disappear. There is a sweet spot within this rhythm where the motion back and away is so subtle that you no longer perceive it and the object begins to appear to exist in and for itself, within the back-and-forth sine wave of attention, as though you are holding it in a gravity field in your mind. This back-and-forth motion of attention is also known as “giving the object space to breathe”. It means you don’t grab at it. You let it exist gently in a space within your mind. The back-and-forth rhythm is not necessarily fast, either — in fact, smoothness is way more important, and the ideal rhythm might actually be quite slow, yet with such smooth transitions between the back and forth of attention that the change is barely noticeable. When you imagine the breath as flowing like waves, you are building this back-and-forth motion of attention into the meditation, so it is present from the start — that is why that metaphor is so powerful.

This method can all be quite ridiculous to memorize and attempt to carry out while meditating, which is why we use metaphors — simple language ideas that help us put such methods into practice without having to think too much. The metaphor I came up with when asking myself how I treat the breath in concentration practice is: I am nursing the breath.

So, I am sitting with eyes closed. I breathe in through my nose, and the breath enters my mind. I welcome it with a soft smile, mouth slightly open, and with kind eyes. I hold it gently in my mind, cradling it like it’s a baby. It’s free to move –coming in slightly as it wants, going out slightly as it wants — but I never really let it go. I am handling it very softly, playing with it, and caring for it. I am nursing the breath. I feel very warmly about the breath every time I find it here in my mind.

It is by bringing in such warm imagery and perspectives that the emotional systems are mobilized and the mind can breathe life into the object, having it become its own full-blown experience. All jhana is a creative act in this regard.

Smile Jhana

A tech Mayath and I were synchronistically playing around with recently is using the smile as the object in concentration meditation. A main principle of yoga is, “Where attention goes, energy flows.” In real terms this means that if you place awareness on a spot within the body, electricity will flow in the nerves at that spot. Different nerve activations produce different changes in emotional state and perceptions (hence the chakra system). The nose-bridge spot seems to produce a pleasant, invigorating stimulation, possibly due to a connection to the dopamine circuit as reflected in the phrase, “The sweet smell of victory.”

The nerves of the face which produce a smile are strongly connected to the reward circuit, especially those around the eyes. You are probably already able to effect a slight positive state-change just by smiling, but you might also find the feeling “fatigues” quickly. With the style of attention paid to the smile via concentration meditation however, nerve current flows linking into the reward circuit are able to be maintained far longer and more intensely than normally possible, leading to rapture and — as Mayath and I found — some of the fastest and most mind-blowing jhanas around.

Mayath wrote:

Was just gonna email you because I also did the smile meditation and had a mind-blowing hard First Jhana too! I couldn’t even stay meditating. It was so blissful it hurt. I didn’t get it as quick as you but I got it within 30 minutes. I wasn’t even trying to go for Jhana. I was ignoring Piti but it just completely overwhelmed me. It was incredible. My whole visual field filled with light and sucked me in. I completely lost track of time. I felt like I was only in it for a few minutes but when I checked my watch 30 or so minutes had gone by.

We have slightly different techniques for using the smile as the object (which are actually the same technique, approached from different perspectives and using different language).

Mayath tends to smile and simply become aware of the mental breath flowing in the face around the smile. Breathe, smile, breathe, smile, as one awareness.

I tend to begin smiling slowly, imagining flow in my cheeks from two dots either side of my nose outwards underneath my eyes. All I am doing is smiling very slowly from those points outward, so that there is a constant nerve current flow there. Simultaneously, I become aware of my breath and notice how it has become cooler and more blissful. So, this meditation quickly becomes a hybrid smile-and-breath meditation (and I have yet to find a concentration meditation which is not hybridized with the breath in some way).

As your awareness reaches the ends of the arrows, start again at the dots (pictured below). This prevents “attention fatigue” and keeps the smile fresh. Also, become aware of any tension arising elsewhere in the face which attempts to “block” the smile, and simply let that tension go and return awareness to the nerves beneath the eyes.

Awareness applied to the smile in this way causes it to become its own object — the smile begins to exist as a thing in and of itself. Simply turning your attention to the smile object induces rapture each time.

On the night Mayath and I were discussing in the snippet above, I had practised the smile jhana only for 8 minutes before going out. It was so intense I was literally seeing stars. Then, on the night out, I found I could tune into the jhana again just by smiling then putting awareness on the nerves covered by the arrows in the above picture. Stars were literally visible in the periphery of my visual field. In fact, even just smiling regularly would draw me back into the jhana. It was like the jhana was calling me, trying to absorb me again. This is really powerful stuff.

Running nerve current flow as in the picture above is more of a kundalini practice, where energy flow is induced directly by will in a chosen body location. Mayath’s method of infusing the area with the breath is more of a straight concentration practice. Both methods achieve the same thing, just approached from different perspectives.

I predict that many people will find the smile a far easier object to work with than the breath in order to attain the first jhana, and that we will see quite a few positive reports shortly. Let me know your results in the comments below!

Masoom wrote:

How important is posture in meditation? I try to keep my back straight during meditation, but it sometimes hurts to do so. I inevitably go back to slouching a little. So every time that happens, I have to pull my back straight again. However, this distracts me from my meditation and also I should not have any body movement while meditating. What should I do about this?

Please perform this exercise immediately before meditation (taken from my reply to a question about a related issue):

• Stand up, legs straight, arms by sides.
• Tilt head right back.
• Make a “kiss” face — pout the lips and hold it. The circle formed by the lips should be aligned as directly as possible over the top of the spine.
• Breathe out slowly through your nose. This will cause the eyes to enter REM and you should let them do that and generally relax.
• It is the action of breathing out which causes relaxation — do a continuous exhalation through the nose until the lungs are empty, then breathe and repeat.

Repeat this many times for several minutes. It will cause a lot of unwinding, most of it on a micro level. It will also most likely dramatically improve your posture.

Posture is extremely important in meditation, as one of meditation’s main goals is to get energy flowing up the spine uninterrupted. However, the meditation technique itself should encourage a straight spine by causing energy to flow up towards the head, which is one reason I give the nose bridge as a point of attention as it is quite good for that. The third eye is another excellent area to look at for a straight spine.

To get this working really well we will borrow techniques from kriya yoga (a.k.a. kundalini yoga).

I recommend you place your hands on your knees, hands open, palms pointing upwards. Let your jaw be loose and mouth open just a crack, and your tongue soft with the tip very gently placed behind the front two teeth.

Finally, keep your eyes looking towards your third eye area for the entire duration of the meditation – but let your eyes be very loose and able to flicker as they wish. At some point, hopefully, your eyes will enter ultrafine bursts of REM (though you should not be overly conscious of this; it is very natural). These REM bursts allow blissful feelings to arise very easily, and are extremely important for relaxation and general health. I will be writing more about this shortly.

Your pose should look like this:

(Courtesy of Sadhguru’s excellent Isha Kriya meditation, which I will be reviewing soon.)

You can sit on a chair with feet planted on the floor if you lack the flexibility to sit cross-legged.

These poses encourage energy to flow up the spine and should end your posture problems. With attention directed in this way, the spine should stay straight by itself, just resting gently against its own upward energy flow, without requiring any more of your attention, leaving you free to meditate.

Hope this helps!

Sadhguru is an Indian mystic and yogi whose videos I have been watching on YouTube for about a year now. He created the Isha Foundation which teaches meditation in centres in both India and the United States. He holds talks at these centres regularly and publishes 5–15-minute snippets of them on YouTube, each usually covering one specific subject. There are literally hundreds of them on Sadhguru’s official YouTube channel. He is an engaging speaker and his talks are filled with profound wisdom. I watch them daily. He is probably my favourite guru, currently.

Sadhguru has an interesting past. He attained enlightenment spontaneously one day, apparently having had no prior interest in mysticism. He claims knowledge of his own past lives, and that his last three lives have been virtual copies of his existing one as Sadhguru. He says that he and yogi friends who shared past lives together still accidentally refer to each other with their old names from time to time. Sadhguru’s wife also died several years ago. He claims she wilfully entered mahasamadhi, which is when an enlightened yogi chooses to consciously exit his or her body during meditation. The physical body dies and the yogi’s karma is said to have been extinguished, meaning he or she will not be reborn again. This has predictably led to controversy, with some claiming she committed suicide and others accusing Sadhguru of murder. This controversy has only increased my interest in him.

Sadhguru leans far more toward the Hindu side of Indian mysticism and his stories are more colourful than their drier Buddhist counterparts. They are filled with saints and devas, and talking animals including monkeys, snakes, lions and pigs — everything you expect from a mystic of India’s rich mythological tradition. Sadhguru is an adherent of Shiva above all, who he calls Adiyogi (“the first yogi”). He holds the Buddha in high regard but considers his path to enlightenment to be just one among many, and that his method is dry and technical and only suitable for certain people. This is an interesting counterpoint if you are coming from a primarily Buddhist background, as I did.

Sadhguru has a polite but evident disdain for Western dualistic thought and the monotheistic religions that both arise from and propagate it (“Everything is either good or bad, God or Devil. Can anyone really be just one of these things all the time?!”). I have drawn similar conclusions, partly as a result of receiving emails from Christians describing my site as “demonic”. This mode of thought is the cause of all major schisms in the West — left vs. right, liberals vs. conservatives, good vs. evil. The tendency to split reality into two opposing camps has greatly hindered our ability to see life just as it is.

The purpose of this post is to introduce you to Sadhguru’s beginner’s meditation, or kriya as he calls it. It is technically a kriya as it utilizes energy work (a.k.a. kundalini). The reason I am encouraging you to try it is that, when I first saw it just a month ago, I was very surprised to find that it is almost identical to my standard kundalini meditation, i.e. the one I practise every day as my default meditation, and which was revealed to me during my kundalini awakening. Sadhguru’s intention is to “introduce a drop of spirituality to every human on the planet”. Here is the meditation, which is guided:

Despite being intentionally made suitable for beginners, this is in no way a “weak” meditation. It is fully capable of inducing strong samadhi/jhana and bliss if you practise it regularly. I will break down the components of this meditation now:

Sitting position — Spine is straight for upward energy flow. Head is slightly back to favour flow into the third eye chakra. You can use a chair if, like mine, your legs are too thick and inflexible to sit cross-legged (though this should probably be worked on over time).

Mudra — Hands are open, upward, placed on knees. This mudra induces broad upward energy flow and a feeling of openness, which is ideal for letting the meditation “take” you. I will sometimes place thumb and forefinger together for a more intense and narrower energy beam, but this is for specific purposes (meaning I know how to channel that more intense energy into samadhi states and visualizations). I recommend you keep the hands open.

Third eye focus — The point of focus – and, essentially, your “object” in this meditation – is the third eye chakra, which is located between your eyebrows. This chakra is the seat of spirituality and is capable of generating states of bliss quickly and easily, usually accompanied with ultrafine bursts of REM. You simply gaze at this point the whole time, and if you are distracted by thoughts just bring your attention back here. I also recommend being aware of your breath, which allows absorption very quickly, but just take it one step at a time and basically do what he says.

Breath control — This very basic intentional exhalation/inhalation will steady the mind quickly, since mind is so linked to the rhythm of the breath. This also allows an easier implantation of the formal resolution.

Formal resolution/intention (1st mantra) — “I am not the body. I am not even the mind.” This is actually a type of formal resolution or intention (a verbal command which will shape the outcome of the meditation) being set right at the outset. This instructs the meditator to let go of his attachment to both his body and his mind and instead experience the True Self, or atman. (This is as opposed to Buddhist meditations which are geared to experiencing No Self, but I won’t get into that topic now).

Chant (2nd mantra) — “Aaaah.” These deep vibrations activate the lower chakras at the base of the spine. Combined with then gazing at the third eye, you have established a steady upward energy flow from the base of the spine to the third eye. I personally achieve this via a “will” for the base of the spine to become active, which is like pressing a button within myself, but that is from the kundalini awakening and you should not attempt to copy that at this time. The “Aaaah” sound is a perfectly valid way to achieve the same activation.

Equanimity — You ignore all activity of the mind and body and return attention to the third eye. This conditions equanimity to those things. You are not attempting to “do” anything in this meditation. In fact you are simply stripping back mindbody chatter to something more fundamental underlying that — the True Self. You are not “trying” to “attain” anything. It is all about letting go of goals and just following the instruction.

He recommends 12 minutes minimum for a sit, but I believe that is so as not to discourage people who would find longer times daunting. In my opinion however you should definitely do 30 minutes at a minimum, and definitely go on for longer if you feel a momentum has been built.

This meditation is a composite of concentration and energy work, and insight also will almost certainly arise with regular practice. I am so impressed with this meditation that I am considering making it the official PPM meditation, recommending it to beginners first and foremost while also continuing to provide materials on the more Buddhist-styled mindfulness, concentration and insight practices. Please let me know how it goes.

This is part of my Start Here series of posts aimed at teaching beginners the basics of the human hardware.

This post aims to address the majority of questions I receive from newcomers to the site, and will potentially save you hours otherwise spent wading through vast swathes of resources and terminology on the web trying to figure all this stuff out. This post will also introduce you to many of the key concepts discussed on this site. Enjoy!

Contents

• Mindfulness
• Hatha Yoga
• Kundalini Yoga / Energy Work
  • Mudra / Hand Poses
• Pranayama / Breath Work
• Concentration / Absorption Meditation
• Insight Meditation
• Magick & The Powers / Siddhis

Mindfulness

Also known as “sati”.

Mindfulness, put in a very basic way, means: “Knowing what’s going on, where, when, and for how long”.

Take a breath right now. How long did it last? How much of your body did it fill? Where did you feel the sensations? How did it affect your thoughts and emotions in the moment? What sound did it make? Which nerves and muscles were used?

To answer any of these questions requires mindfulness. To know how long the breath lasted, you have to be mindful of the time spent inhaling and exhaling (and any pause in between). To know how much of your body it filled, you need to be aware of the sensations of the body that tell you that. There is almost infinite knowledge to be gained about each breath. To learn about the breath you have to be mindful of the aspects you wish to learn about. This means observing, watching, feeling those aspects.

Most Buddhist schools practise mindfulness of the breath as their main meditation. There are other things you can be mindful of, though. You can be mindful of your own thoughts, noticing when they arise, what their content is, how they make you feel, and how long they last. You can be mindful of your emotions, noticing the kinds of energy they invoke in various parts of the body. You can be mindful of your surroundings, noticing how much of the world you can actually see at any given moment, noticing how far to the sides your vision actually extends. You can be mindful of sounds in the environment, like birds singing and other ambient noise. The primary instruction given for mindfulness meditation is that, whatever you are mindful of at any given time, to not be judgmental of it, but to accept it how it is, and allow it to arise and pass as it wishes.

Mindfulness is level zero when it comes to meditation. It is a central pillar of any meditation type. All meditation requires it, and all meditation will increase certain aspects of mindfulness. In short, the more you practise meditation, the more your mindfulness will increase. When you have developed sufficient mindfulness you can begin to practise other types of meditation which use mindfulness in specific ways, for example insight or concentration meditation. These meditations are still “mindful meditations”, but you are mindful of a certain aspect of experience in a certain way to achieve a specific result.

The thing you are being mindful of at any given moment is called your object. So, if you are mindful of the breath, the breath is your object. Beginner mindfulness meditations usually instruct you to be mindful of the breath as your primary object, but also to allow thoughts and emotions to arise and be noticed and allowed to pass (as brief secondary objects). As you become more experienced at mindfulness of the breath, however, you will start to find that you are able to stay with just the breath for longer periods, and that thoughts and emotions are far fewer and have longer spaces in between. This is then your gateway to other types of meditation such as insight or concentration. This training period is required for most beginner meditators to get control over their minds, and this is why I instruct most newcomers to this site to practise my Basic Mindfulness Meditation for 30 minutes each day for a period of two months before moving on to more advanced or difficult meditations.

Hatha Yoga

Also known in the West as just “yoga”.

While not strictly a meditation, I have included hatha yoga for completeness, and because it is important to understand its principles in the context of meditation.

In the West, most people know “yoga” as being a series of movements, stretches and poses performed with the body for reasons of health, exercise and posture. However, in the East, this practice is known as hatha yoga, and is generally performed to prepare the body for meditation (usually raja yoga, a type of concentration meditation).

The true meaning of yoga is “union” and encompasses ALL the meditative arts. Someone who meditates, or practises any other aspect of yoga, is therefore called a yogi.

Hatha yoga, aside from being a healthful practice in itself, has numerous benefits for meditation practice:

• It makes the body flexible and promotes good posture, allowing long meditation sits and preferential meditation poses such as the various cross-legged positions.
• It promotes complete and regular breathing and oxygenates the body and mind.
• It stimulates certain energy pathways. Different poses have different effects on mood and cognition. To understand this, think of the immediate effect standing tall and smiling has on your mood. Physical actions change mind and perception. In yoga these effects tend to be modelled as “energy”. Hatha yoga’s poses are not random but have been crafted over thousands of years to provide specific energy changes in reliable ways, many of which are useful as a preparation for meditation.

Kundalini Yoga / Energy Work

Energy work utilizes the energy principles outlined above, but in a more formal way as either a complete meditation in itself or as a precursor or addition to some other kind of meditation. An example kundalini meditation might involve visualizing energy rising up and then down the spine in specific time periods and cycles.

Energy work usually uses the chakra model, which teaches that there are seven energy centres at various locations on the spine ranging from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. Visualizations, chanting, hand poses, and placing awareness on these chakras are all ways used to stimulate energy in those locations in specific ways.

With skill, energy work is probably the quickest way to lift depression, achieved with particular focus on stimulating the base of the spine. Pranayama breathing is also useful for this purpose.

Mudra / Hand Poses

I have included hand poses or mudras in this section as it seems the best place for it, since they use energy principles. However, hand poses are commonly found in all meditation types.

The hands are extremely connected to cognition and perception. An easy example is that, by pointing at something, you will instantly become more judgmental towards it. Many hand poses in this way are completely automatic and make up the broad spectrum of innate and universal human body language — a raised palm indicating “stop”, and spread arms indicating openness or receptivity, regardless of culture.

The yogic mudra system is, again, crafted over thousands of years to produce specific repeatable results. Some of these will be familiar to you already, such as forefinger tip touching thumb. I personally use the following mudras in the ways listed below:

Dhyana Mudra

I use this mudra for concentration meditation (e.g. being mindful of the breath at the bridge of the nose to attain jhana, covered later) and for insight practice using concentration as a base.

This mudra tends to align awareness to the central axis, making it easier to become aware of sensations of the breath at points on that axis, for example the bridge of the nose or the top of the lip.

Gyana Mudra


I use this mudra for visualization practices within concentration meditation, and for high stimulation into a specific point in the body during energy work (usually one of the chakras). It creates a narrow “beam” of energy which, with skill, can be directed with precision into certain mental processes or body points. Probably the most stimulating mudra.

Palms Open

(Mudra name unknown. Help please?)

I use this hand pose for energy work (e.g. channelling energy from base of spine to the third eye) and for insight practice using energy as a base. I also find it useful for concentration practice with the eyes open, for example becoming absorbed in an object in the distance.

This mudra gives a very broad energy beam moving up through the whole body. When this beam meets the breath the sensations are very pleasurable. It is also an ideal pairing with the third eye. This mudra causes a perceptual shift to feelings of openness, acceptance, receptivity, and the sense of giving yourself up to a higher power or force. It is therefore ideal for giving yourself up to the act of meditation itself and abandoning your resistance. This is my favourite mudra by far.

The hand poses in Western religions can also be classed as mudras. The “hands together” prayer pose, for example, is known as anjali mudra in yoga, and seems to give centredness, balance, and an inwards view.

Pranayama / Breath Work

Pranayama involves manipulating breathing patterns in specific ways to bring about perceptual, emotional, cognitive, and energy shifts. Pranayama is ridiculously effective at changing your mood and is probably the most accessible technique for beginners for this purpose. You can make yourself feel extremely good in a very short space of time, and if everyone practised daily pranayama then the antidepressant companies would go bust practically overnight.

Pranayama, aside from its mood-lifting and other health benefits, was originally intended to make the mind fresh and bright in preparation for concentration meditation. It is highly effective for this purpose, one reason being that it raises piti (pleasure) making it very detectable on the breath during concentration meditation.

There are many types of pranayama but perhaps the best known are alternate nostril breathing and the breath of fire.

Nadi Shodhana / Alternate Nostril Breathing

Alternate nostril breathing is shown at the start of this video. It is then followed by two other types of pranayama which are also worth trying:

Kapalbhati / Breath of Fire

This rhythmic pumping of the diaphragm is highly stimulating and can make you feel fantastic in a very short space of time. I remember that the day I learned this was the first time I really started to feel my anxiety was under my control.

I recommend you search around online for a set step-by-step pranayama guide and follow it for a session to see what it can do for you. So, find a programme for alternate nostril breathing (which usually consists of counting the in-breath, pause, and out-breath in set patterns) and practise it for half an hour or whatever the programme prescribes. The next day, do the same for breath of fire.

Mantra / Chanting

Mantra and chanting use the voice to create perceptual and energy shifts. The voice is intimately connected to the body and mind, and different vocal patterns have specific and often dramatic effects on emotion and perception. Using the vocal apparatus activates nerves deep in the body which may not otherwise be fired in those patterns.

A mantra is usually a word or phrase which is repeated over and over again during meditation, either out loud or in the mind. The phrase might be a saint’s name or a message of goodwill. Alternatively it can be a simple sound, such as “Ahhhhhhhhh” (which, if sang at a low pitch, will stimulate nerves at the base of the spine). Different pitches and mouth shapes have dramatically different effects on the body and mind. Again, chants have been refined over thousands of years to provide repeatable effects, so it is worth listening to experts on YouTube to find useful patterns.

Probably the most well known mantra is “Aum” (also rendered “Om”, with “Aum” being the more phonetically correct spelling), which is said to be the sound of the universe. I can personally attest that, during my kundalini awakening, this sound was present in all things for around a day, which was an incredibly strange experience.

Another popular chant is “sa ta na ma”:

Note the use of an alternating mudra: thumb touches forefinger during “sa”, middle during “ta”, ring during “na”, and little finger during “ma”. I have practised this meditation just once during which I saw what might be described as “universal imagery”. It can be incredibly trippy.

A mantra is sometimes used as the object during concentration meditation.

Concentration / Absorption Meditation

Also known as “raja yoga”, “samadhi”, “samatha”, “jhana”.

Concentration meditation leads to unimaginably blissful and jaw-dropping mental states. The states attainable in concentration meditation are more powerful and pleasurable than any drug or any other type of practice. If you ever wondered why Buddha and other saints are always pictured smiling in statues and paintings, then this is why.

Concentration meditation is also often translated as “absorption meditation”. Absorption is the better translation in my experience, but concentration tends to be the more common term used so I have stuck with that throughout this site.

In concentration practice you choose an object to meditate upon. In most meditation schools this is usually the breath. However, some other objects are as follows:

• Kasina. This is a visual object such as a coloured disc or a flame.
• Sound. This is usually a mantra, repeated over and over either out loud or in the mind.
• Emotion. For example, pleasure itself can be meditated upon (with the pleasure usually occurring and growing with each breath), causing a feedback loop whereby the emotion grows so strong that a profoundly altered mental state develops at which point you are said to be absorbed in the emotion. A common emotion meditated upon in Buddhism is loving-kindness towards other living beings, which is known as metta meditation.
• Idea or concept. For example, in vajrayana Buddhism, a deity is meditated upon until absorption in the idea and visual image of that deity occurs, at which point it is said that you acquire the characteristics of that deity. This kind of meditation can also be used for magickal purposes, whereby a goal or outcome you desire is held in mind until absorption occurs, which increases its chances of manifesting in the physical world.
• Energy. For example, you can use the energy stream emanating from the base of the spine up to the crown of the head in kundalini yoga as your object in concentration meditation.

It is in fact possible to use absolutely anything as an object. In all cases, you progressively train yourself to hold only the object in your mind during the meditation, meaning there will be zero distracting thoughts — an idea which is quite alien to the modern human who is overly trained in discursive thought using the intellect. For example, by keeping awareness on the breath, eventually there will be only the breath. When only the object is held singularly in mind in this way, you are said to be absorbed in the object.

Despite listing several object types above, in reality all these meditations will have the breath as a linked object, because mind and breath are so powerfully connected. This means that, for example, if you are doing kasina meditation with a coloured disc in your mind, the image of the disc will pulse or spin in phase with the breath.

The goal of concentration meditation is to reach a state of absorption in your chosen object. This state is known as samadhi in yoga schools and jhana in Buddhist schools. In Buddhism, concentration practice is known as samatha, and the resultant states are called the samatha jhanas, usually abbreviated to just “jhana” or “the jhanas”.

The state of absorption makes the mind so still that aspects of reality usually covered up by mental noise become visible to the meditator. The meditator can therefore use these aspects to infer principles or revelations about the true nature of reality, resulting in permanent mental or spiritual shifts in their experience of life going forwards. This is known as insight practice.

Absorption states are also so utterly peaceful, pleasurable, blissful, and at times mind-blowing, that they significantly suppress negative mindstates for some time after practice. With regular practice these states become more conditioned into the meditator, leading to permanent upward shifts in baseline happiness and energy. This is a main reason why gurus such as Ajahn Brahm and Sadhguru are so cheerful that they often appear to be drunk at times. Neurochemically, concentration practice raises dopamine, opioids, and other reward chemicals in the brain.

Insight Meditation

Also known as “vipassana”, and several other names depending on the tradition.

Insight meditation is a practice whereby the meditator seeks to uncover some fundamental truth about the nature of reality, with the result being a permanent philosophical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual shift occurring in the meditator from that point forwards. The intended direction of such shifts is usually towards states of less suffering. The final goal of insight practice is “full enlightenment”, which is usually conceived of as a state whereby suffering no longer happens at all. How one goes about reaching this state varies depending upon the tradition. Each tradition is referred to as its own “path”.

Hindu / Yogic Schools

In Hinduism-inspired yogic schools, the goal of insight practice is usually to find the True Self, the Seer, the awareness that exists behind body and mind. It is a kind of all-permeating, universal “mind” in which all experience occurs and which is also the Source of all experience. An example of this kind of path is the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (a good translation is here and its accompanying website and notes is here). The method of this path is — very roughly — as follows: Through regular meditation, more and more refined states of samadhi are attained. The mind is made more and more empty, until the fundamental building blocks of reality (and of the human mind itself), known as gunas, can be perceived. Then, the awareness that those building blocks arise into — the mind beneath the mind, the True Self, Seer or Source — can be experienced directly. Then, the goal of the meditator is to become identified with that mind rather than his own illusory human mind, and to therefore come to “rest in his true nature”, at which point he is said to be fully enlightened.

An interesting yogi from this school is Sadhguru.

Buddhist Schools

In Buddhist schools, insight practice (often referred to as vipassana) involves noticing the Three Marks of Existence (also known as the Three Characteristics), inherent in all phenomena. These Three Characteristics are that:

1. All phenomena are completely transitory, arising into and passing out of awareness, and do not stick around or become stable even for a moment. This is known as impermanence.
2. All phenomena are fundamentally unsatisfactory and therefore cause suffering.
3. There is no “self”, soul, or essence in the meditator or any living being which observes phenomena; phenomena just happen and a sense of self is an illusion inferred when phenomena arise in awareness (as “this side”, the “self”, observing phenomena on “that side”, the field of awareness). This illusion of an observing self is a source of suffering. This principle is known as No Self (capitalized to draw contrast with yogic/Hindu “True Self”).

The goal of the meditator is to notice these Three Characteristics present in all phenomena during meditation, with the eventual outcome being that the meditator lets go of his sense of a separate self who suffers, and kind of rejoins the infinite “sea” of completely transient phenomena that make up this universe. At this point he is said to be fully enlightened.

The realization of No Self in all phenomena can be very jarring for the meditator, since the “ego” — the accumulation of identifications with things and events as a single “self” — gets dissolved progressively through these realizations, which the body often misinterprets as physical death. Insight practice is therefore usually balanced out with jhana (the Buddhist version of samadhi) to provide calm, soothing and blissful mental states in which these realizations can be made. However, there is a practice known as “dry insight” in which realizations are made without the “safety net” of jhana. In my experience, having practised dry insight for several years on the instruction of Daniel Ingram’s book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, this method is completely disastrous and causes all sorts of unnecessary suffering and psychoses, such as the impression that the body is literally rotting away to a skeleton (which is how the survival circuit interprets the dissolution of the sense of self when it occurs outside of jhana). Joy and compassion should always be cultivated alongside insight, via concentration practice, to balance out these rigours.

A good Buddhist monk to listen to is Ajahn Brahm.

Magick & The Powers / Siddhis

Magick

Magick, spelled the old-fashioned way with a “k” on this site to distinguish it from parlour tricks and illusion, is the intentional act of manifesting changes in the physical world using the mind (via such means as rituals, “spells”, visualizations, and meditation).

Magick originated in shamanism and is found in all human cultures. Views toward magick vary from culture to culture. Polytheistic cultures make regular use of magick via devotions, prayers and sacrifices to various deities in exchange for wishes. Monotheistic cultures however tend to frown severely upon the use of magick and give it names such as “Satanism” and “witchcraft”, while ironically practising their own form of magick via prayer, complete with mantras, poses, mudras, intentions, and objects of attention. While atheists do not believe in the magickal powers of individuals, they nevertheless assign magickal ability to the universe itself, namely that it can intend itself into existence out of nothing in their creation myth called the Big Bang.

Magick has enjoyed a comeback in the so-called “New Age” with books and videos such as The Secret providing the rudiments of intention-manifestation via visualizations and affirmations (though in a rather bastardized and impotent way). There is a broad range of attitudes within Buddhist and yogic schools towards magick, with some embracing aspects of it and others sternly teaching avoidance of such temptations; all schools generally see magick as an impediment or distraction on the path to enlightenment regardless of their moral stance.

The basic process of magick (a.k.a. intention-manifestation) is as follows:

1. Decide upon the goal state, i.e. what you want to happen, or the experience you wish to have.
2. Attempt to think through all consequences, both favourable and unfavourable, of the event happening (i.e. what is required for it to happen, the immediate effects of the event, and the long-term changes in reality that will occur afterwards). Tweak or abandon the desire as required as a result of this analysis.
3. Visualize only the desired outcome (so, at this point, do not think about ways in which it cannot happen or other negative/difficult aspects of the desire). Formally state your intention, in the form: “I intend X to occur”.
4. Enter a state of one-pointedness. If using meditation, this means entering the deepest state of samadhi or jhana you can, so that your mind is extremely unified. Western esotericism recommends meditation for this, but also gives the option of “ecstatic states” whereby you select one emotion and do activities to cause that emotion to reach its peak, during which one-pointedness occurs. The emotion you select can be negative, such as terror or pain, and you can also use an intense sexual experience for this purpose (the nature of the emotion chosen is not that important; the only thing that matters is that it reaches its peak). Generally, the desire — the intended goal of the magick — is not thought about during the one-pointedness activity, whether it be meditation or an ecstatic state.
5. Exit the one-pointed state then formally, firmly and forcefully declare, with all the conviction you can muster: “I intend X to happen”. It is far easier to declare this with feelings of certainty after one-pointedness, which is one reason it is used. Know that this request/demand has now been sent off into the universe and is now bound to happen.
6. Now, completely forget everything about the intention, and go about your life, knowing that it is being handled. This forgetful phase is paramount. The event must be allowed to arise in its own time in the course of your everyday life.

The time it takes, and the strength or profundity with which the outcome arises, is dependent on several factors including (but not limited to):

• The strength or conviction of the intention.
• The level of one-pointedness attained.
• The amount of reordering of the universe required, a.k.a. the strain you put on the universe to bend to your outcome (less is better).
• The strength of your belief in your own powers and in a magickal reality and what is possible in that reality (a.k.a. you have a weak “field of disbelief” surrounding the act).
• The strength of other observers’ “fields of disbelief” (ideally you won’t tell anybody. If people do know however then their beliefs can either help or veto your attempt depending on what those beliefs are).
• The natural talent of the magician (it seems some are born with a natural tendency towards and skill for magickal acts).
• How well you were able to forget the intention and allow it to arise in its own time without further magickal meddling.

An article going into the above in a lot more depth, and discussing the morality and ethics behind such acts, is Daniel Ingram’s excellent Magick and the Brahma Viharas.

For further reading I highly recommend the book Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter J. Carroll, which is no less than the definitive guide to magick, and which comes at it from a Western esotericism perspective. Liber Null & Psychonaut is the book I would write if I had to condense all my knowledge and views about the way the universe works into a single book. It even has all the models of reality I have written up in various places on this site. I could barely believe it when I opened that book and saw my own mind staring back at me.

The Powers / Siddhis

The “psychic powers”, or siddhis, are magick expressed in specific ways, giving the practitioner certain abilities beyond the experience of most humans. To call them “supernatural” is a misnomer: all is Nature, and Nature is all; nothing is “above Nature”. To me, the siddhis are so normal now that I do not consider them to be apart from normal reality at all.

The siddhis work in the same way as magick (above) in terms of their being an application of will/intention to change some aspect of physical reality (or non-physical reality, in the case of altering someone’s mind at a distance; but ultimately this will need to end in physical results in order for you to confirm that the the power has “worked”). In fact, magickal intention-manifestation as described above is listed itself as a siddhi in yogic and Buddhist literature. A major point to make here however is that many of the siddhis can arise and show themselves without prior intention. For example, there was a phase near the start of my meditation practice when I would have precognitive visions while in jhana. These were not intended and I never cultivated the ability to control them, either; they would just pop up from time to time.

It is somewhat inevitable that meditators will, at some point, come across some magickal aspect of reality or have their own siddhis begin to arise. What they then do with that aspect of experience is up to them. They might choose to play around with the powers for a while. They might instead choose to ignore them completely and plough on towards enlightenment. They might even choose to become a full-fledged sorcerer or miracle-bestowing saint. Reality becomes fairly plastic and mouldable at the point where the siddhis begin to become understood. (Interestingly, I’ve tended to find that the more I know I can change things, the less I actually want to; I seem to want to “let the simulation run itself” for the most part.)

Daniel Ingram discusses all of these things in the following audio recording, which is well worth a listen: https://soundcloud.com/buddhistgeeks/a-pragmatists-take-on-the-powers

(If anyone can find the original video of that talk, let me know!)

The following is a non-exhaustive list of some of the siddhis described in yogic and Buddhist scripture as being attainable by yogis:

• Intention-manifestation (ability to have anything you desire)
• Levitation
• Remote viewing/hearing
• Knowing the future
• Seeing past lives
• Knowing others’ minds
• Super-strength
• Invisibility

Specific guides on how to attain various powers are written in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

So, there you have it — a fairly complete guide to the basics of yoga and meditation. If you have any questions, ask them below in the comments section!