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