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.

Some patients sectioned with psychotic conditions, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, may actually have a treatable immune disorder, say Oxford University scientists.

A study in the Lancet Psychiatry suggests up to one in 11 cases of psychosis may involve antibodies attacking parts of the brain.

I am now going to make a prediction:

Within the next ten years, scientists will conclude that ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of mental illness is caused by inflammation responses similar to those reported in the above link.

Furthermore, the cause of ~98% of those cases will be agriculture. The other ~2% will be some other environmental toxin, for example the fluoride they put in the water, or a response to injury.

They will discover that:

• If white people eat only what was available in a frozen ice age environment, i.e. meat and root vegetables
• If black people eat only what was available in tropical Africa, i.e. fruit and meat
• If East Asian people eat only rice and fish
• Etc.

…then no one will have mental illness any more.

Of course, by this point agriculture is required to support such large populations. The solution will therefore have to be something like genetically engineering crops to remove the factors that cause the immune response, or to create a medical intervention to prevent the immune response following eating such crops.

The crux of the mental health issue is that body and mind are not separate and never have been. Mental illness is of the body first and foremost (with some feedback loops occurring psychologically, but which are easily dismissed once body homeostasis is restored). But since the symptoms are mainly “psychological” — e.g. hallucinations, fear responses — then scientists have been looking for a psychological description of the problem.

This is a bit like a person arriving at an ER with a stab wound which no one can see. The patient is clearly distressed and they are in shock, fight-or-flight, etc. But because the doctors cannot see the stab wound they assume something is wrong in the patient’s head, and section him instead.

It has mainly been due to my fucking around with drugs that I noticed the “poison” response is identical to many of the symptoms of mental illness (and I believe it is this bodily response which causes many of the psychological effects of various drugs). So I have been pushing the idea that mental illness is primarily a toxic/inflammation response for the last couple of years, mostly in the comments section of this blog. Good to see the medical community is catching up.

The following post is based on an email exchange I had with a Skype student the other day. I have added some extra information and clarification to the below text, and some of this was taken from similar replies to other students, as this is a question I receive a lot.

The question concerns, directly, how to reach jhana, and the magic ingredient that makes jhana happen, and which is the real difference between mindfulness meditation and concentration meditation. The following information will also be in the new jhana guide, and it is good to constantly be feeding you the same information again and again so it starts to sink in.

The single factor that turns a general mindfulness meditation (e.g. mindfulness of breath, “body scanning”, being aware of thoughts, and all that other good stuff) into a concentration meditation with jhana is: one-pointedness. This is where you take your focus from being broad and inclusive and make it very narrow and exclusive. So, rather than trying to be aware of the whole breath at once, instead you focus exclusively on one tiny aspect of it, e.g. the sensations in the bridge of the nose (my personal favourite).

PL wrote:

Quick question: When I switch to concentration meditation do I inhale AND exhale through my nostrils? As you can see from today’s notes I found this difficult …

With all meditation I will breathe in and out through the nose. I also tend to have the mouth open very slightly, though. My tongue is usually gently placed against the roof of my mouth, and the tip will rest against the gum behind the top front teeth.

For concentration meditation my awareness is entirely on the bridge of my nose, as though there is a singularity (a single point) there which my attention HAS to stay within. This will tend towards a focus on nose breathing for most of it. However, with my mouth slightly open, there is always air moving in and out there, too, which takes the “pressure” off of only nose-breathing.

PL wrote:

What exactly do you focus on when you focusing on the bridge of your nose?

The sensation of the breath? Why the bridge. I find it hard to find a sensation to focus on (unlike the belly or breathe at your mouth)

And why do you put your tongue on the roof of your mouth again?

I focus on a point in spacetime — a singularity — located at the bridge of my nose.

You already do this with your attention often anyway: if you look at a dot on the wall, you are focusing your attention on a single point in spacetime. If you hear a bird behind you and to the left, your attention goes to that single point without you having to look with your eyes.

Attention can be directed towards objects without using the obvious senses such as eyesight or hearing. If you just THINK of a point in spacetime, your attention is already going there.

So, I think of the bridge of my nose. This often starts out with breathing, since it is easy to get a location as air passes through the bridge of the nose. However, what about in between breaths, or when the breathing slows down? At that point you use SENSATIONS at the bridge of the nose.

In any part of your body, at any time, there are sensations. The reason the breath is used for concentration meditation is that it creates obvious sensations at points it passes through. So, when you breathe in through your nose, you should be able to feel sensations at various points within the nose, and be able to focus on a specific set of sensations, e.g. within the bridge of the nose, as the breath creates those sensations there. However, as you have probably realized, the breath tends to change by itself at various points, sometimes slowing down and sometimes becoming completely still. The tendency here is to lose track of the sensations in the point of focus, since they are now no longer being so strongly generated.

However, there are always sensations in those points, available just by thinking about those points.

“Where awareness goes, energy flows.” (Primary principle of yoga)

If you think about the bridge of your nose, sensations appear there. They are subtle but can be found. You just keep bringing attention back to the bridge of the nose again and again, many times a second if needs be. Eventually you “lock in” and can keep attention there, and this is known as access concentration. Now, if you send enough attention into that single point, it eventually “explodes” and becomes a jhana. Some people get distinct explosion effects; others get a slower yet still prominent arising of jhana, noticeable by sudden bright lights, and intense feelings of happiness and exaltation.

These feelings can also sometimes arise slowly but noticeably and must be nurtured into a jhana. This is done by maintaining exactly what you were doing to create those feelings in the first place! The factor that creates those feelings is one-pointedness: the act of maintaining attention upon that single point, the bridge of your nose. It can be tempting to get distracted by the good feelings when they start to arise, especially during access concentration which is when they will start to arise. However, this will take your focus away from the one-pointedness that is creating those feelings. You should instead therefore choose to stay with the one-pointedness, even though the good feelings are coming and you are getting excited. The reward is that by remaining one-pointed the good feelings reach a critical mass and explode into a jhana, which is far more powerful than the good feelings created by access concentration alone. 

If you can’t find sensations at the bridge of the nose, then you have to imagine that they are there. In reality, putting attention on the bridge of the nose itself creates subtle sensations there. You just need to keep looking harder and harder and for longer each time (this ITSELF is concentration). Whether you are looking for sensations, or finding them and experiencing them, you are CONCENTRATING. This is what concentration is: strict control of attention upon a single point. People don’t realize that it is the act of concentrating itself that creates the jhana. Even if nothing appears to be happening, the concentration itself is “charging up” the jhana and it can suddenly appear.

Concentration itself is a steady flow of attention towards a single point. You should imagine that that single point is something you “charge up” by pouring your attention into it. Eventually it reaches a supercritical mass and explodes and becomes a jhana. If you get distracted because it starts to feel good, you won’t cross that threshold. Once you are in jhana you can in fact allow yourself some distraction to enjoy the good feelings. Or, you can maintain one-pointedness and progress to the next jhana. It is the one-pointedness that carries the progression the whole time.

I use the bridge of the nose because I find that it is the most stimulating centre and links into the dopamine centre, the “sweet smell of victory” reward circuit connection with the nose, and this leads to the quickest way to get rapture, the “exaltation” feeling indicating the start of the progression to full jhana. Other points on the nose or body have different “flavours” of emotion and I have found the bridge of the nose the easiest one to work with for beginners because the effects can be rapid and noticeable. Other yogis agree with me — Yuki on the comments section here has practically an identical method to me; it’s worth searching out our discussions on the blog.

The tongue is placed in the roof of the mouth to keep it still and thus reduce verbal thoughts. Thinking is just very quiet speaking. Your tongue and other speech apparatus twitch when you have verbal thoughts. If you keep the tongue still, verbal thoughts get quieter, since every circuit in the body is two-way. The Buddha also practised this method.

So, here is a quick recap of what I have just said:

• Mindfulness of breath is used initially because it “smooths” erratic thoughts and emotions. It begins to train broad concentration and get the mind flowing as one. I recommend 15 minutes of mindfulness before going for jhana.
• To switch to concentration meditation, make your area of focus much smaller, e.g. a single point at the bridge of the nose. Pour all attention at this point.
• The single factor that creates jhana is one-pointedness of mind: attention directed at this single point.
• This point can be imagined as collecting your attention energy and charging itself up. When it reaches supercritical mass it will explode into a jhana. However, this process can also be slower with a definite noticeable charging of energy before jhana arises. The speed at which jhana presents is determined by a combination of things including technique (i.e. how much attention you can pour into that single point in a given time) and how well you prepared your body and mind beforehand, e.g. with the 15 minutes of mindfulness of breath to promote the correct conditions for jhana.
• As supercritical mass approaches, good feelings will arise (access concentration). It is important to maintain one-pointedness and not be distracted by those good feelings, as it is the one-pointedness that will have you cross the threshold into full jhana, whose feelings are far superior to access concentration’s. So, you must delay gratification even as the good things are starting to happen! Wait for more — it is worth it.
• To progress to higher jhanas, return to one-pointedness and this will carry you through to them.

Now, there are some apparent inconsistencies in the above with what I have written about entering jhana in the past. These are specifically:

• The idea of working with a “flowing breath”, whereby you actively control the breath into streams flowing through a single point e.g. in the nose. This creates the illusion of flow and stability in the object indicative of jhana.
• Working with pleasurable feelings to amplify them and create the “supercritical mass” required for jhana intentionally via those feelings.

These practices are not at odds with the principle of one-pointedness I wrote above. In fact, these things will tend to occur by themselves as part of the mind’s “jhana process” — the rhythm it falls into while entering jhana, since this is something it already knows how to do once the external world is let go of.

However, the skill of one-pointed awareness must take precedence. Without it, you won’t get jhana. Once you are good at it, though, you can use things like a flowing breath, and tuning into good feelings, to accelerate jhana entry, and even to customize the jhana (for example, by selectively tuning into bliss more than the other factors, etc.).

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!

First things first: the jhana guide won’t be ready this month. My primary obsession of the last five years has been understanding the myofascial system and how it works to create postural distortions, and thereby creating techs to release and unwind those distortions. This has fully devoured my attention for the last couple of months. I am sorry about that. I only have so many hours in the day and my attention goes compulsively towards whichever obsession prioritizes itself.

I am now pleased to say, however, that this project has born fruit. I now have the most complete model of myofascia I have ever had, and have developed a fairly simple method for correcting it — an exercise which is simply repeated thousands of times in different poses. This exercise uses what I call “elements of the yawn” — the physical actions taken directly from yawning — the reason being that the true purpose of a yawn is myofascial release, a fact that no one else on this whole planet seems to have realized except me. I will write up the model as a thesis over the next few weeks. I will also attempt to write up the method at the end but, while simple in principle, I feel it may still require private workshops to fully get across.

Tomorrow or the next day, I will write up a couple of new jhana techs I have been working on with Mayath. I have essentially been writing the jhana guide for the last several months anyway, releasing it as a series of posts in this way, and I will continue like this. Receiving feedback in the comments section has been essential in refining my methods and how I teach them. It is actually a good thing that I didn’t just put together a guide and throw it out there, like I did the first time around. This has been a much more insightful process. If you are desperate for a jhana guide, then The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa (John Yates, PhD) is the book currently in vogue. Rather than being a complete jhana guide in that vein, when I do write up my system it will be more a series of personalized techs I have developed over the last few years, with the goal being to get beginners to jhana in the quickest time possible.

For now, here are some other unrelated bits and pieces I’ve come across in the last few weeks.

Valerian Tea

Now that I’m living alone I have begun to fall into the habit of drinking a couple of beers each night after work. This is not a habit I want to encourage, as alcohol seems particularly rough on the body, to me. Last week I experimented by switching to valerian tea at night.

I have been really impressed with this herb. Valerian most likely acts on the GABA-A receptor, which is also alcohol’s primary receptor, but without the “carpet bombing” effect on the other receptors that alcohol has. The result is a far more selective sedation, without the “buzz” of alcohol. I would compare valerian most closely to a low dose of valium.

I use Dr. Stuart’s brand valerian tea. I put two bags in a large mug and pour on boiling water, then sip it, usually while watching something. When it’s done, I refill it with boiling water again, as I find you can get quite a few cups of tea out of these bags.

Within ten minutes there is noticeable warming, anxiolytic, sedative effect — the kind of “smoothing of reality” you get with other sedatives such as benzos and low-dose alcohol. This effects reminds me of an audio engineer adding reverb to a track to sweeten and soften it.

I now actually prefer valerian tea to alcohol for nighttime unwinding. The only downside is that the bags smell like a nightclub carpet (cheese and vomit). However, that smell goes away once the boiling water is on them.

Valerian is not a “drug drug”. It will not get you “high”. It is very subtle — the perfect nighttime drink.

Binaural Beats

I had an early night last week and decided to play around binaural beats played through headphones while sleeping. This was the first tone I chose:

The YouTubers in the comments section report some glowing experiences regarding energy events in the third eye region, but I assumed most of them were experiencing “scripted events”, which is where your mind will give you exactly the experience you expect it to (the placebo effect falling into this category). That’s not a bad thing — scripted events can be some of the most memorable and stunning, and learning to script events is in fact a totally valid way to experience things such as jhana, lucid dreaming, and other mind-trips. However, I was more interested in whether these tones could create reliable experiences as an external trigger, so I lay there with some awareness on my third eye chakra, waiting to see if the tones activated anything there. Not much happened, so I let myself fall asleep.

I went straight into a dream. I was in a room with some annoying music playing (which was of course the tone from my headphones), and I began running around looking for the source of it. Devices such as computers and iPhones appeared as my brain attempted to rationalize the omnipresent sound, and I began fiddling with the devices to try to deactivate the music. I looked to my side and noticed a blonde German prostitute locked in her own struggle, also trying to turn the sound off on a computer. We exchanged a look of knowing solidarity, and I was about to go back to what I was doing when I thought instead that I should probably turn to her and ask, “Shall we have sex?” I was totally shy and sheepish, just like in real life.

“Yes,” she said, to my delight, and I barebacked her right there on the rug. I didn’t even have to pay. Despite this being a non-lucid dream, it had given me everything I wanted, and I woke up with a big smile on my face. I felt fantastic for such a short sleep.

The next night I decided to try a dedicated lucid dreaming track:

Again, this led me into a bizarre dream, but it was still non-lucid. However, this dream featured lots of magick including flying and various energy powers. This was a completely fun dream and again I felt very refreshed.

My verdict is that these tones can be fun, but rely largely on your own expectations and “scripting” for the experience. I believe the tones could probably be used as carrier waves to take you into lucid dreams as, with practice, their presence in the dream could become your clue that you are in fact asleep.

Taboo

If you haven’t already, you need to start watching the BBC series Taboo, which stars Tom Hardy as a black magician. The show features fire meditation, divination, evocation, ritual killings, incest, and other fun stuff. While the show is good in itself, if you are already familiar with the black and arcane arts (perhaps by having read books such as Liber Null & Psychonaut) then your enjoyment will be enhanced as you nod along knowingly with his misdeeds.

This isn’t the yawn tech I talked about in the last post, but is something interesting I’ve been playing around with for a while. I’d like you to test it please, and report back in the comments section.

Ideally this would be tested by people who already have a yoga or stretching routine and could therefore see more clearly whether or not this helps, but I’m eager to hear back from anyone.

What I want you to do is visit this tone generator and enter a frequency of 172Hz, then press play. Sing along with that note, like this: “Ahhhhhhh”. Memorize the note, keep singing it, and turn off the tone generator.

Now, while continuing to sing the note, perform some stretches or poses.

The only question I want you to answer is: Does singing the note make poses or stretches easier?

For example, to touch my toes I ordinarily have to do several warm-up attempts first. However, while singing that note, I can go straight down in one motion.

Bizarrely, this also works while just imagining the note playing in my head, without me physically singing it. Give that a try, too.

The tone of 172Hz is matched roughly to the resonance frequency of my own voice, so other pitches might work better for you. To find your own voice’s resonance frequency is easy enough: it’s just the pitch of your normal speaking voice, minus any affectation you might have picked up such as a deep “tough guy” voice. (Side note: Speaking deeper than your natural voice tone actually makes your voice less powerful acoustically.) Just try a variety of tones and see if they help your stretches/poses. A good idea is just to pick a tone on instinct as these usually turn out to be correct.

Finally, go for a walk and sing a tone in your head. Does this improve posture and walking motion?

Let me know your results in the comments section below.

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.

I received an email from Google recently telling me the security protocol for the current forum will no longer be supported and that users will receive a security warning when attempting to log in. Rather than upgrade the old forum, I’ve decided to create a brand new forum reflecting the current epoch of PPM.

Click here for the new forum

I will be contributing to this forum in order to make PPM into a community again. I will be replying to posts every Saturday. Please read this notice for more information.

I have also added this post explaining my current view on common psychological issues.

The old forum will be inactivated in one week. You will still be able to view posts, but login and posting will be disabled, so you should archive any personal messages now.

Thanks, and enjoy the new forum!

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

I am by no means a master at socializing. In fact, I am somewhat introverted and reclusive, preferring my own company most of the time and using social contact mainly to “tick a box” on the human needs list. However, I have come a long way from where I started — a place wherein, due to disastrous parenting, I was completely clueless about the ins and outs of the human social world and as a result managed to broadly alienate or outright piss off just about everyone I came into contact with, to varying degrees.

The turnaround for this state of affairs came one day as a dawning realization: Interactions between humans are so profoundly based in the intent of each individual involved that they are better off modelled as psychic events — a mind-to-mind exchange — and managed as such. At that point I found that just changing my intent towards each person had dramatic effects on the interaction. I then went through a phase of trial and error, swapping in and out intentions based on real-world results, and this phase continues to this day — hence, “intentional socializing”. This process also helped reveal my existing (pre-installed) intentions which mainly came from my parents. One benefit of starting from level zero in this way is that I now have a good idea of the problem and the solution and can help anyone lacking in this department get up to speed potentially quicker than if they were just muddling through it themselves.

Despite my invocation of the word “psychic”, this article will not invoke “woo” and is designed to cater to people of literally any worldview — from scientific materialist, to religious fanatic, to model agnostic chaos magician.

The inspiration behind this article comes largely from my time spent on “pickup artist” forums, and my own forum here at PPM. A very concise history is that I started lurking on pickup forums (such as the old FastSeduction) back in around 2002, and came across some truly horrible advice for men trying to pick up women, which basically consisted of giving them a technique then having them approach hundreds of women till one “took”. The issue is twofold: first that the techniques themselves were largely ineffective, second that doing any of this from a basis other than social competence is guaranteed to make you look like a total weirdo and will batter your self-esteem via the negative results that ensue.

Later on, dealing with my mostly male readership on a more personal level on my own forum, I came to realize that many guys’ problems boiled down to an inability to get what they wanted from others, and from not understanding the intentions of themselves and others going in. Social anxiety itself can be very broadly recognized as an inability to navigate the social world, and this again comes from a lack of understanding of the interplay between intentions going on in any social interaction. An anxiety arises when you either don’t know what’s going to happen, or you assume everyone intends to get you, or you don’t think you can cope, or you don’t believe you can get what you want from others. The whole thing is just a frustrating, agonizing mess. There is a tradition of guys seeking esoteric techniques, drugs, jhana, enlightenment — you name it — to solve this problem, which is the equivalent of calling in a nuclear strike when a handgun would do. More accurately, you need a hammer and to be able to see where the nails are.

Good socializing is a matter of good modelling and methodology– how you think about it, and how you carry it out based on that model. There are infinite models, but the one I use is based on the intentions of the individuals — mainly yourself, since yours are the only intentions you can control directly (and they are far more programmable than you might think).

Intention as a Basis for Social Interaction

In any social situation you are trying to get something out of the other person. In the majority of cases this goal is an emotional exchange — you are scratching each other’s backs. This is probably the number-one thing to realize for overly linear thinkers who tend to assume interactions are based on informational exchange. They’re not. You usually don’t ask someone “how are you?” to get the informational facts about their emotional state, but rather to set the emotional basis of the interaction as “interested” and “caring”. That is the intention. This is real primate grooming stuff. But how you ask that question will completely shape the nature of what follows. If your intent is to just tick the box of bare minimum social convention — saying “how are you?” to “get it out of the way” — then you will come across as dry and disinterested. The words are polite, but that’s irrelevant because the frame you are setting is that you really don’t care either way, and this is how you will be perceived.

Such nuance has been modelled in the past in terms of body language, vocal inflexion, and so forth, and there are many materials out there instructing you on how to tweak those things (micromanagement-style) to get the result you want, in what inevitably comes across as manipulative and disingenuous to whomever is subjected to such practices. Make no mistake: for the vast majority of you, taking such advice will make you look like a maladjusted weirdo or creep who is trying to pull a fast one. Humans are massively attuned to the intentions of others no matter how well veiled the initiator believes them to be. Sadly, the pickup forums were filled with such techniques. Trying to disguise underlying intentions by masking their outward manifestations is entirely the backwards way to go about things. Instead, you should set the intention correctly from the outset. If you want to come across as caring and compassionate, then start off by actually deciding to care. In your mind, set the intention, I intend to care about this person. Then ask, “How are you?” All the body language, all the vocal inflexion, and all the basis of the interaction, is downstream from the intention. Those outward signs of caring manifest from the intention to care.

That, in the shortest way possible, is all there is to this, and is the crux of this post:

set intention → act

To start getting positive outcomes, you need to be very straight with yourself about what your intentions are, and begin getting into the habit of purposefully setting intentions mentally before interactions.

What’s the Problem?

For those who currently aren’t very good at this, it boils down to one problem — unhelpful intentions — which we can further split down into sub-problems:

• Lack of intention. If you don’t set specific intentions before interactions then you are going to default to some autopilot intention. There is never “no intention” present. There’s always something driving why you are there and what you are doing (even if it is just something like “killing time”, which will tend to make you appear very disengaged).
• Unconscious unhelpful intentions. These almost entirely come from your parents. This is where you are trying to get something from other people (praise, attention, even things like being treated as an outsider) which are virtual carbon copies of your interactions with your parents, or how you observed them interacting with others (there will be more on this in a moment). This category also covers intentions such as “just killing time” or “going through the motions” where nothing specific has been set in mind but you just don’t feel like staying at home that day.
• Conscious unhelpful intentions. These are rare since (most) humans want to be liked, and want to experience social cohesion. However, I have included it for completeness. This category would cover things like setting out to make someone feel small, or setting out to fuck with people. Again, these are usually on the back of some unconscious intentions established via parents/upbringing (I doubt there are many people who would choose conscious malevolence if they had an alternative available).

The Parents

Most of your intentions, when first starting out, come directly from your parents. It means that you are trying to get from people the kinds of interactions you had with your parents or observed your parents participating in. I will assert at this point that, for the vast majority of people, almost all of these intentions are completely unconscious. If your mother is an attention seeker (due to not receiving enough attention from her mother), you will be an attention-seeker (due to not receiving enough attention from your mother who was too busy trying to seek attention from others to give any to you). It is the blind photocopier of history at work. It means that in your interactions with people you will have the unconscious intention to get a load of attention. It’s all about you. We all know someone like that. Hard work, aren’t they? That’s just one example out of almost infinite. Typically people will align along common themes of strategy, though, and psychology for centuries has attempted to categorize people via groups of dominant themes.

The bottom line in all of this is as follows. If you had really socially-adjusted parents who treated others with respect and compassion, who wanted to create win-win situations — in other words, who had helpful intentions — then you will have sucked up all those strategies like a sponge and you will be set for life (and you most likely won’t be reading this article). But, if you had maladjusted parents, always focused on the “little me”, always trying to get some inner emotional need met through desperate means, and who therefore created ongoing win-lose situations (which are really lose-lose situations), then you now have practically a complete explanation for your own social strategies and dysfunction over the years. It really is that simple.

Luckily, you do NOT need to find out all those little idiosyncrasies and bad strategies you have picked up in order to change them. You do not need to debug the old software. You simply format the hard drive and install something new.

This is rather at odds with previous strategies from the fields of psychology which would have you dig into your past and analyse every behaviour, under the incorrect assumption that knowing “why” something has gone wrong will somehow fix it going forward. In my view the “why” is irrelevant. It’s far better to just start something new and better in line with what you want. You begin setting conscious intentions before interactions (with win-win in mind) then act. The results are positive and a reward loop starts whereby the old software is systematically replaced with the new one. Fascinatingly, this is also the best way to figure out the “why” of how things were before: when you have solid positive results in your new system then the flaws of the old strategy become completely patently obvious to you. The memories of your mother doing X or your father doing Y will come bubbling up to the surface. Sometimes it’s nice to know the why, but ultimately it’s irrelevant when it comes to moving forward with your life. This is very similar to how, if you’ve been depressed for a while and now you are now happy, you suddenly realize how completely unproductive and limiting the thoughts you had while you were depressed were. You don’t go back and “debug” those old thoughts! You realize they were just a product of the mindstate you were in at the time and choose happiness as your preferred state going forward. Wipe the slate clean.

So, this article is all about setting conscious intentions, acting, getting the new results, then tweaking the intentions next time if necessary. This can result in largescale rewriting of behaviour and personality in a relatively short space of time. You also do not need particularly to try that hard to “act in alignment” with the intention. So, if you set an intention to care about someone, then ask how they are, you do not need (much) to emphasize some caring vocal tone or body language, either; the intention itself tends to take care of much of that for you. The intention itself literally shapes the interaction. The details of the doing are far, far less important than the thought behind it. You just have to be very straight with yourself about the intention beforehand and decide firmly upon it before you speak. You crystallize the intention in your mind then it becomes the point of reference for the interaction going forward. This can lead to the development of new habits very quickly.

Good Intentions

The basis of all good intentions is to create a win-win situation. This means a good outcome for all involved. How do you get what you want without someone else losing something? Usually it can be done. You find something they also want. For the vast majority of casual socializing it is just the exchange of positive emotions. This is the basis of all manners. We are just scratching each other’s backs. There is no cost to this. You don’t lose by “going first”. Feeling good about someone feels better than feeling bad about them. In this light, why would you ever choose to have bad intentions for someone? Pick the win-win.

That’s the best general rule. Now, drilling down, you get some nuance in what different people want as their side of the “positive emotional exchange”. Men and women are a good place to start since they are the first immediate division we find when tweaking the approach for different people. In general:

• Men want respect.
• Woman want attention to their emotional state.

This is blurring a little bit in recent times as the genders are becoming more alike (the reasons for which I won’t speculate upon in this article). This means that some women tend towards wanting respect and some men tend towards wanting attention to their emotional state. However, the bulleted rules above are still good general guidelines, and I have found the following intentions work well:

• For men, literally think the words in your mind, “Bloody good guy.” Then shake his hand. That’s a very English phrase. Maybe you could say, “This is a cool dude,” instead. You firmly say it in your mind, then smile. The interaction is set. Men are basically that simple. The intention is that you will experience him as a great guy, and he will be.
• For women, think the words in your mind, “I wonder how she is?” Then ask how she is and listen. She will most likely say, “Well, so and so happened, so I’m [some emotion].” Then you acknowledge that by matching her emotional state just a little and nod and say to her, “Oh, that sounds [bad, good, interesting, etc.]” Notice how she now seems like she has let off some steam and is back to happy (or okayish). She will probably now ask how you are in kind (emotional exchange). I will usually tell her some upbeat or funny thing that’s just happened to me because I intend to have fun conversations and do not intend to dwell on negatives (see? Intentions).

I will not begrudge anyone stuck on negativity for whatever reason; instead I will tend to just move on to someone whose intentions match or complement my own. This is the basis of all great friendships.

Notice how the “doing” in the above is the minor point. The major point is the intention behind the doing. Imagine if you had thought to yourself, “This guy’s a cunt,” while shaking his hand. Would the interaction have gone well? Unfortunately, unconscious intentions can often take that form. People are walking around all the time with those kinds of intentions as the backdrop to their interactions. They don’t know it. They’re walking into situations on autopilot, with intentions like:

• “I intend to win this interaction to prove to my dad that I’m not a loser.”
• “I intend to get from these people the attention and praise I should have received from my mother.”
• “I feel weak so I intend to make this person feel small so I feel like a big man.”
• “I intend to get mothering emotions from this woman.” (Oneitis)
• “I intend to get this woman into bed so I can feel good about myself for a few days and brag to my friends.”

These are bad intentions because they do not set out to create win-win situations. They are mainly based on taking. That is why you must consciously insert a good intention before you act — an intention to both give and receive. Whatever autopilot intention may have been there is just totally negated and replaced by the new preferred one. It’s that simple. You could spend a lifetime poring over your past and trying to figure out what intention and why is developing at any given time, but what’s the point? Just do the right thing instead, forever.

Why is Existing Advice So Shit?

There are a couple of things going on here. Firstly, the people who are already good at socializing, for the most part, don’t really know why they’re good. Their intentions have just been conditioned positively from birth. If you asked them how to be good with people then their truthful advice would go something like, “Well, you go back in time and be born to parents who have compassion, self-reflection and forethought, a positive emotional base and mental stability, who sort problems out verbally rather than using emotional or physical violence, and you let their behaviours rub off on you over a period of about seven years.” One benefit of being born to atrocious parents is that I had to figure this stuff out myself and arrive at a map of how to go about it, which you’re reading right now, so there was a lot of insight to be gained and shared. That is the only benefit, though: the years have been hell.

The second thing going might involve the brain hemispheres. The right hemisphere handles the underlying emotional themes and contexts, including the autopilot intentions conditioned from birth. However, the left brain handles the execution, the doing, and is mechanical and linear, putting one step after the other to create a result. The left brain also happens to be the verbal centre. So, you ask someone who is good at socializing how to do it, and they have to then explain it to you in words. The left brain kicks into gear and it is its perspective, its processes, its worldview that comes bubbling up and out their mouths. The result is an explanation which falls on a frustrating spectrum of incoherence, from the vague (“Just be cool, maaaaaaan!”) to the overly complex and micromanagerial (“Pace and lead… mirror their body language… make eye contact when he does this but not when he does that!..”). This is a major problem with verbal communication: the narrator, the left hemisphere, always manages to inject its mechanical and idealistic take on things during the translation from thematic to conceptual. The key is to give greater awareness to the themes that underlie the behaviours of the person you wish to mimic, rather than their specific actions. Generally, the more complex and long-winded someone’s explanation of how they do things is, the more they have missed the point.

More Techs

I’ve given you all you need.

However, using the intention paradigm, some interesting tricks can arise. For example, if you are a shy guy walking over to meet a new girl for the first time and you want to create rapport, imagine her as being someone you already get along with, such as a female friend or cousin. Say “Hi” then think the name of the girl you already know. This will make you feel like you already know each other. The intention is to emulate the positive aspects of an existing relationship. It is techs like these that give things a more “psychic” feel. It can be extremely fun.

It would be great to hear other ideas in the comments section, making this guide a kind of living document where techs are shared using the principle of intention as their basis.

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!

At some point it became a mission of mine to teach you concentration practice (samatha) in order that you could reach jhana in the shortest possible time. I believe that the breathing technique itself is the most key aspect of reaching absorption in the breath, and this technique seems to be very much neglected in the materials I have read. I’m hoping this post will put a dent in that.

This is a beta tech, meaning I would like you to practise it in a dedicated way for at least a week and report back to me in the comments section before I turn it into its own post.

We will now be using LuminousBliss‘s awareness spot for feeling the sensations of the breath entering the nostrils, which is the columella, indicated as the blue “V” on this bizarre picture I found on a rhinoplasty site:

Learning this breathing technique should replace any other meditation style you are currently practising for at least the next week (with the exception of pranayama which is an excellent warm-up for this).

The technique is split into two phases: Discovery, where you learn the mechanics of the breath, and Practice where you use what you have learned to enter absorption and hopefully jhana.

Discovery

This phase will likely take up most of your time during the first few sessions, and that’s a good thing as it trains both mindfulness and concentration.

1. Sit down in your normal meditation pose and close your eyes. Bring awareness to the spot indicated on the above diagram.
2. With mouth closed, exhale somewhat forcefully through your nose in a short burst.
3. Notice how there is now a reflexive inhale. The inhale happens completely by itself as a product of the exhale, meaning you do not have to do anything extra to have air coming into your lungs. During this reflexive inhale you should notice your chest filling slightly, a sensation of energy rising up your body and spine, and sensations of air passing over the awareness spot into the nostrils.
4. Now, you exhale again through your nose, but notice you do not need to push out so hard to create the reflexive inhale. This is key. You need to notice that gentle pushes out create an immediate reflexive inhale, and you need to discover the optimum energy of the push to create an ongoing cycle. So, a breath is always instigated via an exhale in this way. (You do not “suck air in”; breathing is always started with a push).
5. Spend time working out how hard to push out through the nose, and when, in order to maintain the cycle. Also notice that you can use a push to start a new breathing cycle if your mind wanders (which is an excellent way to keep re-anchoring to the breath and getting out of distracting thoughts). Maybe you will need to do lots of little pushes at the start to keep your mind on the end of your nose, and in the breathing process generally. That is fine!
6. Now, you need to notice that there is a sweet spot in which you can time the exhale just after the inhale peaks so as to create an uninterrupted flowing cycle of breathing. This can be super-subtle. It means that out-breath becomes in-breath becomes out-breath by itself, with the process seeming to become automatic. Finding this sweet spot is really the start of concentration. You must master the art of creating breathing cycles using gentle out-pushes until you find this sweet spot whereby the cycle begins to maintain itself in a flowing way.

Once this subtle cycle is happening you should find that your mind is going completely into the process, and this is the start of absorption. Your whole mind just gets sucked into the process of gently breathing in this way, partly because it takes so much mental power and concentration just to set up and maintain awareness on the cycle.

If your mouth opens a little bit by itself during any of this, then that is perfect. It’s natural. This whole thing should end up feeling pretty natural, even if at the start all the little out-pushes feel a bit unnatural.

Additionally, if you find your awareness going onto other parts of your face or your body (like those parts want “attention”) then that is cool, too — just settle into that kind of awareness, attend to those areas by just noticing them, then return to the cycle, using a little exhale push at the nose to start it up again if you got lost.

Just cultivating this awareness of breathing like this will build massive mindfulness AND concentration, largely centred on the columella, the bit in between the nostrils. If it takes a week to set up this technique, then that is time well spent. You can also practise breathing in such a way while walking around in daily life, since breathing using the exhale to begin the cycle is correct and is a central pillar of Alexander Technique.

Practice

Practice begins when, in your meditation, you have established the out–in flowing breath cycle described above. All you do now is allow your mind to go more and more into the sensations and process of the breath cycle.

If you find yourself beginning to smile during this, then that is a great sign.

The most important sign to watch out for however is the nimitta, the growing bright light behind your eyes. The more absorbed you become in the breath, the brighter the nimitta will become. This will almost always be accompanied by growing feelings of bliss, pleasure and happiness. You must however stay with the breath (at the columella), and not be distracted by the nimitta or the bliss. Eventually the nimita will become so bright that it will kind of “suck you in”, at which point you will enter jhana, which is noticeable via total orgasmic heroin-like bliss (it cannot be mistaken; it really is that obvious).

It really is as simple as that. But “simple” does not necessarily mean “easy”. Maybe this will blow jhana wide open for some people; for others it could take weeks to establish the mindfulness to set up the breathing cycle then the concentration to stay with it long enough to enter jhana. You won’t know till you try it in dedicated fashion for some time.

I really think this is key, so please practise it and report back to me in the comments section below.

It is well established neuroscientifically that the right brain is better at controlling the body due to its greater neural interconnectedness with all regions. The right brain also works better with visualization than with verbal or mechanical commands.

This is a visualization tech I invented for posture, to be done whenever you get up from a sedentary or contracted pose such as sleeping or computer use. I would like you to try it and report back in the comments section.

This uses “sucking air in” breathing for the duration of the tech. Then you revert to “pushing air out” breathing afterwards when you’re going about your business.

1. Stand up.
2. Imagine that your legs are sausages, including the foot as part of the sausage. Breathe in while imagining they are filling up like sausage balloons.
3. Now imagine your ass and pelvis is a single round balloon. Breathe in while imagining it is filling up like a balloon.
4. Now imagine your whole torso, including your back, is a single balloon. Breathe in while imagining it is filling up like a balloon.
5. Now imagine your arms are sausages, including the hands. Breathe in while imagining they are filling up like sausage balloons.
6. Now imagine your neck is a balloon. Breathe in while imagining it filling up like a balloon.
7. Now imagine your whole head is a round balloon. Breathe in while imagining it filling up like a balloon.

While breathing in (through mouth or nose, however you feel is right at the time, but usually nose), you should feel your diaphragm pulling right down. This is probably most noticeable during the torso inflation.

In between each inflation, obviously you should breathe out.

I have a feeling this will make even the most contracted hunchback be standing completely upright at the end of the sequence.

The sequence above is arbitrary; I have just listed it in a bottom-to-top order to make it easy to remember. If you find a better sequence for yourself then that is fine.

If you’re anything like me, you might notice huge asymmetries in the body as this progresses, perhaps with thick bands of muscle connecting parts of the body strangely at sweeping angles across it, and causing your head or other body part to pull to one side more than the other. This is myofascial training caused by asymmetrical habits, especially computer use and sleeping poses. Asymmetrical muscle buildup is basically irreversible, but I think these thick bands might be good candidates to work on via yoga, traditional stretching, and body work such as massage, though I don’t have a programme for that in mind currently.

After the sequence (repeated a few times if you feel necessary) you want to switch to Alexander Technique “pushing air out” breathing to go about your business. It is also worth YouTubing Alexander Technique movement principles to move more freely and have the right brain better even out asymmetries via that visualized movement.

Let me know how it goes.

Step 1: Neutralize Your Jaw

Your jaw needs to be either neutral or smiling in life. When it clenches, it has a downstream effect on the whole body that contracts everything.

The following (very simple) exercise can be done sitting, standing or lying, at any time, to neutralize the jaw and, in fact, to remove part of the mind–body feedback loop that reinforces emotional states. So, for example, neutralizing your jaw can be done immediately to help end states of anger or poutiness.

This will be done stood up in this case as it is a preparation for the next step.

1. Put lips together gently.
2. Blow air very gently into your cheeks and chin so they puff up just a little bit.
3. Feel that your jaw is now sitting in its own “cavity”. The slightly puffed-up cheeks and chin add what feels like a volume of space around the jaw. Notice that, sat in this cavity, it is completely relaxed.
4. Now, smile gently, using your face muscles, not your jaw. So, you should find that your muscles around your eyes play a far greater role in creating the smile, and that the smile is being gently pulled towards the ears.

This can be used as a state-breaker at any point during the day. If you find yourself tense for any reason, do the above.

I also recommend that you go to sleep with a neutral jaw, with no pillow. I believe a main reason for poor posture is the misalignment of the jaw that sleeping with a “crook neck” on a pillow conditions into you. Bad stuff, guys. No pillow from here on out. You may find that, lying in bed, neutralizing the jaw immediately causes tremors. This is a good thing since it shows that the misalignment is resolving itself.

Maintaining a neutral or smiling jaw is also a brilliant mindfulness meditation for daily life. It means you now have a built-in “scanner” for tense moods. If at any point you notice a tense jaw, make it neutral. If you are anything like me you might find that you had a tense jaw often, especially during computer work. Just keep an eye on it. It is surprisingly fast to condition a neutral or smiling jaw as your default state. After a couple of days you might find you are running this completely on autopilot, and haven’t made a tense face in hours or even days. Seriously, this is that good.

Step 2: Smile-Yawn

Here is the zinger.

1. Stand up, feet shoulder-width apart, arms down by sides.
2. Neutralize the jaw and smile by following the exact steps above.
3. Look up.
4. Gently cup your tongue, like in the below picture but not as exaggerated:

5. Begin sucking air in gently, through your nose at first then through your mouth too as it opens.
6. While smiling, begin opening the mouth by pulling the cupped tongue down vertically towards your feet. So, you are literally using your tongue to drag your jaw open and down, and the tongue is always pulling downwards in a straight vertical line towards the ground. This mouth opening sequence is driven entirely by the tongue pulling downwards, and you breathe in during this.
   • You should feel all sorts of nerves activating and spaces opening up in the lower back (and everywhere else, in fact). If you have a particularly tight back then just opening the jaw fully in this way may take 30 seconds or even longer.
   • The tongue should pull the jaw open downwards through resistance. During this you should be hearing a “rushing noise” in your ears as your inner ear is opened up, as the tongue pulls through resistance.
   • The throat should also feel like it is opening up, as though the “channel” of the throat is expanding downwards and outwards into the body as you breathe in and pull the tongue down.
   • Your arms should completely relax and in fact be allowed to slide downwards during this.
   • The head will likely want to come back even more during this and that should be allowed.
   • Sucking air in through the mouth should be done gently during this till you are fully inflated. However, if your attention gets split at any point, then you should give priority to the tongue pulling downwards and the throat opening up rather than the breath.
7. Bring awareness to any tight areas in the body while doing this. Mental awareness of these spots induces REM which helps resolve them.
8. “Eye scrunches” and other characteristics of a yawn may take place. Of course, these are completely to be encouraged! You should aim to get into these aspects and ride with them, but it’s no big deal if they don’t happen.

After the sequence, which may take 30 seconds or even a full minute to complete if you are really stiff, you will hopefully find that:

• Your eyes teared.
• You now feel very blissful and even “high”.
• It is now far easier to smile, the jaw is more neutral by default, and you have greater freedom in your body and mind.
• Just regular breathing now induces piti (pleasure).
• You are now stood up very straight. In fact, I urge you to do this in front of a mirror, looking before and after at the curve of your lower back to see how much this exercise straightened it out in no time at all.

My advice now is to immediately repeat this sequence several more times (in a relaxed manner), using the tongue to find and pull down through resistance. Find major blocks and pull through them while smiling. The first several times you do this will make major positive changes to the structure of your body.

After this initial period however you will just be performing the sequence for maintenance purposes. The sequence should be performed every time you stand up, either from lying in bed or sitting. It is especially useful immediately after computer work to undo the harmful effects of sitting at the screen.

The above sequence should be your “primary yawn”. If however on subsequent sequences you wish to extend the arms or legs or make other stretching movements, be my guest. You can be creative with it but my advice is to try and follow your body’s natural instincts.

Also bear in mind that the tongue pulling downwards is the primary catalyst for internal body straightening. This is because the tongue is one of the few muscles which connects to literally all the myofascial sheets in the whole body. I think about it like this: Imagine a sock that has been half turned inside-out. Now grab the toe end of the sock and pull it, imagining that this straightens out the whole sock so it is no longer inside-out. The toe end of the sock is your tongue. It connects to all connective tissue (fascia) in your whole body and can be tugged on to straighten it all out. The other place where this can happen is in fact the anus, and you will notice that, while doing the yawning sequence, the anus will clench and draw upward into the body, completing the other end of the “straightening out the sock” analogy.

I could talk all day about how and why yawning works. If you check the Wikipedia page on yawning you will find that they have consistently missed the boat in every theory. It’s pathetic, really. My model would effectively replace that entire page. However, the important thing is that we got the tech out of it, and I’m eager to hear your results.

I was hanging around the kitchen at work the other day pouring boiling water onto my valerian bags. “This tea really stinks,” I said to the woman next to me. “But it tastes great once the water is on the bags.” I didn’t want her to think the stench of cheese and vomit wafting off the valerian was me.

“Oh, what is it?” she asked.

“Valerian tea.”

“I’ve heard of that. Isn’t that something you drink before bed as a sleep aid?”

“Yes,” I said. “But if you drink it during the day it basically makes you high as a kite all day without any serious side-effects.”

“Love it!” she said.

“You can try a couple of bags, if you like? Just boil them up and then keep refilling the same bags all day. It’s rolling bliss.”

She later sidled up to me at me desk to get the bags. “If you really want something special at night, try this.” She tapped three letters into Google: ZMA. “It gives you insanely vivid dreams.”

I gave her the bags then did my own research.

From Wikipedia:

ZMA (Zinc Monomethionine Aspartate, Magnesium Aspartate and Vitamin B6) is a supplement used primarily by athletes, gymnasts, and bodybuilders. It advertises itself as a ‘recovery aid’ that allegedly helps the body achieve deeper levels of REM sleep.

Some more searching around showed that her claim about ZMA creating strange dreams was corroborated by many other users. When my ZMA arrived, I took double the recommended amount as an “attack dose”, and went to sleep.

I thought I had seen everything when it comes to dreams. I became an advanced lucid dreamer in my late teens and I’ve seen everything that has to offer. A couple of years ago I played around with combining jhana with sleep to create “jhana dreams”, scripted adventures I would experience with my memory as the creator being wiped, all against the intensely blissful backdrop of jhana. More recently I had been entering samadhi using just body awareness, then letting myself fall asleep in that state to give crystal-clear dreams of beautiful scenes bathed in an omnipresent golden light.

I didn’t think I could be surprised by what ZMA had to offer, but here we are. ZMA dreams are fundamentally different to regular dreams but in a way that is hard to pinpoint. For a start, they are incredibly vivid – particularly the colours, which are sharper and brighter. The dreams also have a very epic quality about them. They are long – seemingly far longer than ordinary dreams – and are “broad-ranging”, weaving together many different emotive themes to create an epic narrative. Some of the dreams can seem to last several hours, though it is unclear at this stage whether this is due to dream time dilation, or whether they actually last that long in regular time (I failed to check my clock on waking). Finally, these dreams often appear to have content unrelated to one’s own life. Normally, my dreams will contain themes related to events of the past week, though jumbled together to form their own strange yet familiar narrative. ZMA however sometimes just seems to pull in themes from nowhere and have you live them as a movie, giving a kind of “past-life” feel to them. Fortunately, this unconnected feel tends to make me able to snap out of them more quickly, with less emotional “dream hangover” than normal ones.

Here are a couple of examples from last night.

The first dream began as a vantage point in a Mexican village, where a peasant woman was reluctantly selling her two young boys, aged around seven and eight, into child slavery. ZMA dreams often begin in this way as a floating vantage point, like a camera recording a movie, with no inherent ego on “this side” experiencing the dream as a personal observer. Two mustachioed scumbags bought the children and said, in thick Spanish accents, “Maybe you meet your half-brother and sister, eh?” and then chuckled, the implication being that they had already bought children from this woman who had died in their work yards in the years before. The children were taken to a plantation which was just the rough grassy terrain alongside an old railway track. They chopped some sort of crop with scythes before raking it into piles for collection. They were inexperienced, though, and mostly flailed the tools around clumsily, before one accidentally struck the other with a rake. As kids do, this erupted into a rake fight. The other child hit his brother with the rake several times, knocking him to the ground, and then continued to hit him in the head, unaware of the implications of the weapon, smashing his skull until blood brain mush oozed. He had killed his brother, and the camera stayed with this scene until his realization of what he had done, before panning off to show other scenes of utter despondency in the child labour camp along this old railway line.

At some point the “camera” became “me” and I was in the movie as a young slave. I was able to board a train travelling on the other side of the tracks away from the work yard and was chased along the train by banditos in a running gun fight. Finally I arrived at the station and had to try to negotiate my way through guards who were searching for escaped slaves, whilst looking after three young runaways who had joined me. This whole “movie” appeared to last at least two hours, and was interspersed with footage explaining some of the Mexican peasant woman’s backstory. It was absolutely fucking mental and I woke up feeling like I’d just been in another world for half the night. Luckily, because the dream had seemingly nothing to do with my current life, it was easily brushed off as a strange and harrowing but thoroughly immersive and entertaining adventure.

In the second dream, I attended an entire Queen concert, with Freddie dressed in his usual vest and white trousers get-up. The concert was good but Freddie seemed somehow “off” the entire night. When it finally ended, I was able to head Freddie off as he exited the stage and I asked him, “What happened tonight?”

He said, “I just feel tired.” Then he gave me the same look my cat had given me when it was dying. “I feel so cold…” he said.

He knew he was dead, and that he wasn’t supposed to be there. That creeped the hell out of me.

So, those are some of the experiences I have had on ZMA so far. It is a total cheat code for vivid, complex, narrative dreams. The dreams are mostly non-lucid, and contain lots of non-character “camera” points. It is a totally bizarre way to dream, and could give insight into No-Self if interpreted well. The supplement has also induced some lucid dreams, but I struggled to maintain control of those before waking up. Perhaps people currently experimenting with lucid dreams could benefit from ZMA.

Last week a conversation began in the comments section of the Types of Meditation post when Malik asked what my views are on something called “nondirective meditation”. I had never heard of this practice before and there was some exchange of ideas where we tried to figure out exactly what it is, with some input from Arpan, too. A lot of links and information were exchanged and I’ve waded through it in order to bring the main points to you in this blog post.

So, here are the notes.

In all meditation I’ve practised up until this point, I have always used an object to anchor the mind to in order to stop it from wandering. This could be the breath, or a candle flame, or a sound, or whatever. The point is, I always gave the mind something to “latch onto” to maintain concentration. The idea of having no object was completely foreign and frankly unbelievable to me. Yet this is exactly what nondirective meditation is.

The way I have been practising it the last week is as follows:

1. Sit very still with eyes closed. In fact, staying very still is the only “direction” I give myself. I also use the dhyana mudra, pictured above.

That’s it. You can let the mind wander, go into verbal thoughts, have feelings and visual thoughts and memories arise, notice things about your experience such as being uncomfortable or feeling rotten or wanting to get up, make little egoic plans, and basically do everything you would’ve been doing anyway except you are sitting very still. Then, something amazing happens. The comments on this link describe it well:

After about 30-40 minutes, it felt like my mind “cleared” and my attention settled on my breathe quite naturally, although i did nothing to keep it there. The pure bliss this practice gave me is hard to explain. It’s heavy, thick and extremely consistent – i get teary eyes from happiness several times a week after doing this. Any kind of stress or anxiety about something just drops. It’s replaced with pure relaxation and inspiration. The effect seems cumulative so far. Yet i do nothing. No focus, no mantra, no sounds, no counting, no anything.

[…]

The reason that non-directive meditation works so well is, i believe, because it doesn’t involve doing anything but rather just being which is a very rare state in our fast-paced society. When you just are, the mind can naturally unravel it self.

(Emphasis mine.)

This meditation is fully jhana capable. In fact, the willingness of jhana to arise entirely by itself has triggered a thought process in me whereby I am now evaluating whether things like using an object, constantly manipulating attention so it points towards that object, and suppressing verbal thoughts and other distractions, are actually a hindrance to meditation. I never thought I would be thinking those words, let alone writing them here.

When you use an object (as in directive meditation), the purpose of that object is to suppress the monkey-mind by taking attention away from the monkey-mind and sending it towards the object. It is like you are saying firmly to the monkey-mind, “NO. Look over here at THIS instead” (repeatedly taking attention back to the breath or whatever your object is). Whether you do this lightly or strongly, with narrow or wide focus, with short intense bursts of concentration or longer periods of broader mindfulness, in directive meditation you are always trying to steer attention away from the monkey-mind and towards the object, with the goal of the monkey-mind eventually “giving up” and the mind becoming still and unified around the object.

In nondirective meditation however the total reverse approach is taken. The goal is not to control the monkey-mind, but rather to let it burn itself out on its various ponderings and schemes. Whether it takes 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes or longer, what I have found is that, reliably, at some point this will happen: the monkey-mind will eventually give in to the stillness and total bliss will arise.

Now, I don’t want to get ahead of myself as these are early days. However, I am very excited about how this is looking so far. Rather than drawing conclusions at this point, I will instead just tell you what happened over the last week during these sessions.

On my first session, I sat and immediately found myself slipping into my existing pattern of conscious suppression of verbal thoughts, with attention becoming very narrow on the breath at the nose (and the tension that arises as a result of such directive action). I consciously had to break this pattern and go into verbal thoughts, and I did this by noticing what I was doing and having a little internal dialogue with myself about it. It has been a long time since I have allowed myself to do this. Anyway, I found my attention naturally going onto my breath at various points which was interesting. I also found that allowing myself to speak in my head was very liberating (which probably suggests something about the wrongness of the way I was doing it before, i.e. with continuous suppression of those thoughts).

I would find that my mind would notice little lights and swirls in the dark stuff behind my closed eyes and would make little commentaries on them. I just let the mind go towards whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted. I noticed that while doing this there was a bigger sense of awareness growing in the background, kind of like a great big soft cushion. At times my breath would appear to pause and there would be something like an anxious tension in there. At these moments, when I didn’t know what to “do”, I simply said the words in my mind: “Do nothing.” Then, breathing would spontaneously restart and the tension would fall away.

At around 10 minutes into this, something very special happened. The verbal thoughts started getting slower and more effortful, and finally it seemed like they were being sucked out of me and into that great big soft cushion of awareness that had been growing in the background. That awareness cushion began to take centre stage and all my thoughts began flowing into it, seemingly fuelling its growth. Indescribable bliss and gratitude arose, along with that “full”, satisfied feeling of first jhana. I found that my awareness had come quite naturally to be upon the breath, and the “awareness cushion” was now completely linked to the breath. My eyes had also come to rest looking at the third eye position. So, my mind had found its own “objects” in its own time completely by itself. This level of jhana would normally take me 20-30 minutes to reach when using the breath as an object, so the fact I got there quicker with no object was very exciting for me. Unfortunately my alarm went off and I had to go to work. I nearly said “fuck it” as I wanted to sit there forever but I got up and went to work. The next day I set aside a lot more time for my meditation.

On the second day I set things up exactly the way I had the day before. On this occasion however the bliss did not arise so easily, though there were definite windows where it was shining through. After around 20 minutes I found my verbal thoughts had naturally disappeared, but that I was in what Mayath and I have been referring to as a “dead jhana”, a state where the mind is still but dull. I stayed another 10-20 minutes in this state and the bliss of the previous day did not arise. However, later in the day, I was walking around a shopping centre near where I work, and usually I consciously tune into the sense field, especially the far edges (e.g. my peripheral vision, or the sounds of the environment) to get some “present moment absorption” which leads quickly to mindful bliss but requires ongoing conscious effort. On this occasion however I just said to myself, “Do nothing.” Suddenly bliss rushed in and I absorbed instantly into the present moment, with the veil between this side (“me”) and that side (“the world”) temporarily disappearing (it is the goal of meditation to have this barrier permanently removed). The verbal command to simply do nothing deactivated the processes that in fact prop up that veil. It is a way of letting go, and is coming directly from this nondirective meditation practice.

During the third day’s meditation bliss was arising quickly, just a couple of minutes into the meditation. However, I found myself “grabbing” for the bliss which would cause it to retreat. It is common for the monkey-mind to try to subvert a working tech in this way to try to grab the bliss from it while avoiding the “bad” bits. The key here is to realize that this itself is just part of the meditation. It is the mind going through its motions on its way to unravelling itself. You just have to “do nothing” and eventually it will pass. On this occasion the heavy bliss began to coalesce again once I let go of the need to control it. However, the alarm went off again and I had to go to work.

The fourth and final session was last night, before going out. I set aside around 30 minutes, though I wish I’d gone for longer. I have this annoying habitual mental process at the moment which has been going on for the last several months specifically concerning going out to socialize. The process goes something like this: “Because I’ve been meditating so long and experienced all these wonderful states, I should be able to sit and access them before going out to put me in a great mood so I can go and get what I want from the world.” There is a huge tension surrounding this presumption as it is a kind of performance anxiety with a lot of attachment to outcomes — exactly the sort of thing you should be letting go of in meditation. I had reached the point where directive meditation, e.g. trying to force concentration on a breath object, was actually fuelling this tension, making me even more tense before going out. By sitting and doing nothing however I found myself going through various motions, my feet tapping nervously, thoughts racing, chaotic emotions swirling, and so forth. But, eventually, the stillness came. This was spontaneous like the first session. I wish I had allotted more time for the sit because it was just getting into the good stuff when the alarm went off and I had to go to meet my friends. But this was a significant improvement in approach, with a tangible mental stillness I had not been able to generate before going out for some months. This made me very hopeful for the future.

My goal now is simply to give more time — a LOT more time — to these sits. One of the best things about this new approach is that by specifically having no method the tension surrounding the need to perform within meditation has disappeared. This vastly increases the capacity for bliss and stillness to arise naturally. The major shift in my mind is that I have now started really, really looking forward to meditation again, because I now know that I don’t have to do anything during meditation but sit, and the mind will naturally unravel itself. I predict that I will be increasing my session times vastly going forward, perhaps to two hours minimum. I have already started waking up earlier each morning in anticipation of these sits which itself is a noticeable change.

It’s still way too early to say for sure, but my feeling is that this is meditation the right way, the natural way — that the mind wants to fall into states of stillness, and you just have to give it the time in which to do so. Nondirective meditation may well become the standard meditation I teach here on PPM.

I phoned Aldous in the week to tell him about my experiences with nondirective meditation and he said, “Ummm yeah, I’ve been meditating like that for ages. Many people meditate like that. It’s how Alan Watts always taught it, too.” I am just surprised with myself that I never thought to meditate without an object before, and that doing so was so easy and powerful. But, let’s see where this goes!

There are two processes many humans don’t seem to do any more. The first is “conscious sleep” (a.k.a. meditation) wherein the mind is allowed to wind down in its own process without conscious control or direction of thoughts.

The second is the correct induction of NREM sleep, or “unconscious sleep”.

Omission of these two processes, especially the first, is likely responsible for most mental health problems in the world.

1. Pre-sleep

The “Do Nothing” meditation for the induction of “conscious sleep”:

1. Sit on chair, feet flat on floor.
2. Place hands on lap like this:
   
3. Close eyes.
4. Aim to stay very still. However, if you need to adjust your posture from time to time you can.
5. “Do Nothing”. Allow your mind to wander wherever it wants. Allow as much verbal dialogue as your mind wants. Also, if it wants to settle at some points, let it do that. If it comes back online, let it be online. There is no attempt to control the mind at all, but the body does stay still.

That’s it. After 30–40 minutes the verbal mind will burn itself out and give way to a state of peace. This state can feel extremely nice, in which case you will probably want to stay in it awhile. It may take longer. How long it takes however is not important since the time is going to pass anyway.

Often the verbal mind will stop earlier into the meditation (even as soon as 5–10 minutes in) for short windows, which are very nice, but it will tend to turn back on quite quickly. Just let it play out exactly as it wants – it is all part of the process.

During these quiet windows you will likely find that your eyes are looking at a space between your eyebrows and you become more aware of your breathing. These are good signs. However, you do not need to become concerned with these; just enjoy them when they happen.

This meditation works because, when sitting still with eyes closed, the mind’s natural tendency is to unravel itself to a state of peace. This is a natural process and it just needs to be given the time in which to do it.

2. Sleep

The correct inductions for unconscious sleep.

Induction 1

1. Lie in whatever position you are most comfortable in.
2. Stay completely still.
3. Gently look towards the spot just above your top lip (the red dot on this diagram):
   
   Keep light awareness on this spot.
4. This may cause your breathing to pause. Stay with the pause, maintaining awareness on the spot. Eventually, after several seconds, breathing will restart suddenly by itself, often with an audible “snore”. Breathing will tend to become very deep at this point and can quickly pull you down into unconsciousness.
5. If the process gets broken for whatever reason, just bring awareness back to this spot again and wait.

You don’t have to “try to relax” or anything directed. Just look at the spot and things begin to take care of themselves.

If you get things happening like sudden body tremors or kicks, these are completely normal. Proper rest has many functions, one of which is the release of body tension. Go with the tremors for a while if you feel your body needs them. Then bring awareness back to the spot. Eventually unconsciousness will happen. If you wake up and want to go back to sleep, just bring awareness back to the spot.

Induction 2

1. Throw the pillow on the floor. It will not be used.
2. Lie flat on your back in bed.
3. Let your neck really go. Imagine that it is just kind of falling into the bed under its own weight.
4. This will likely cause your head to sway to one direction (due to more myofascial tension being present on that side of the neck, but don’t worry about that — good sleep helps correct this over time). Your head might even make little figure-of-eight motions before finally settling down, or turn to the side. Just let your head arrive at whatever position it wants to.
5. Now check your legs. If one leg wants to be drawn up slightly, or turned a little, do that. Just make your legs very basically comfortable, without over-thinking it.
6. Now check your arms and do the same. Some good default arm positions are as follows:
   1. Arms by sides. Wrists are loose. Hands open or closed — choose whichever is comfortable.
   2. Hands underneath head. Fingers interlocked, or one hand below the other — choose whichever is comfortable.
   3. Hands resting on shoulders. Hands gently cup the shoulders, or rest as loose fists — choose whichever is comfortable.
   4. Hands level with head, resting on the bed (hands closed or open — whichever is comfortable).
   5. Hands resting loosely on hips.

   In any of these positions the arms can be asymmetrical — just follow whatever feels comfortable.

7. Close your eyes.
8. Just let your mouth go kind of loose. Let it be open or shut however it likes. Let it go loose, and see what it wants to do.

For me, this final point triggers what I’m calling “snore breathing”, and I drift off into unconsciousness very rapidly. However, you can just lie there like that and think about whatever you like. You don’t need to “try” to go to sleep — the position itself begins that process automatically and you will fall asleep soon enough.

There is a very distinct breathing pattern for sleep which I only noticed myself doing after making these kinds of conscious comfort adjustments, following my body’s needs carefully as I instructed above. This breathing pattern is the one associated with snoring, though many people do not actually make overt snoring sounds while breathing in this way. (As a side note, I believe that the snoring sound itself is conditioned by pillow use, with pillows misaligning the airway and not allowing smooth fascia release into the throat and nose.)

For me, the breathing pattern sounds more like a light “Hccchhhhhhhh…” breath in followed by a gentle throat whistle “…cccchhhhhhh” out. In any case, the “snore breathing” pattern, whether you make audible sounds or not, is the correct breathing pattern for restorative sleep. If you hear yourself breathing like this in the moments before you drift off, you are certainly doing the sleep induction correctly.

I have a fairly robust model linking the processes of sleep with myofascial release. This includes REM, snore-breathing, and the preferential sleeping positions the body will choose if you tune into its needs like in the above induction. The model also includes pre- and post-sleep actions like yawning. I will have to write it up soon, to plant my flag in it if nothing else. However, the important things are the techs which keep coming from that model.

Mailbag

I gave the “Pre-sleep” and “Induction 1” techs to an insomniac student of mine to see if it helped him. Here is our exchange.

KT wrote:

I tried this before going to bed last night. I stayed with the meditation for 25 minutes. Somewhere in the middle, I had that familiar sensation I’ve had during good meditation sessions, where my eyes become extremely focused on a spot slightly up between my eyes. The mind became very focused for maybe 15-30 seconds. Most of the time, however, a huge volume of thoughts were swirling so fast that I couldn’t even read their contents! It was absolute chaos in there! I had to stop before the thoughts had finished, because I was already very late for bed.

It’s funny that you mention focusing above the lip rather than below the nose, because that’s what I automatically switched to after trying technique #2 for the first time. I haven’t had much success with it, however, as my concentration skills are really poor right now. Putting gentle awareness on the spot is really difficult for me, as I stray within a couple seconds.

Going to bed before finishing the ‘do nothing’ meditation may not have been the best idea. After going partly unconscious, the thoughts started up again with the same ferocity as before. I was taken through a roller coaster of sharp thoughts while half conscious, eventually triggering sleep paralysis with nightmarish high pitched noises. Fortunately, I’ve gone through this often enough that I faced it head on and let it play out. Fell asleep after this and woke up in the morning feeling my usual self – well rested in part, but definitely missing some deeper piece of sleep.

I tried the meditation again while lying in bed in the middle of the day. I hoped it would lead to a much needed refreshing nap. I didn’t do this with the intention of napping and waking up refreshed. I feel this is very important, because it leads to anxiety, like how you described anticipating pleasure while doing the no-effort meditation. Without any intention to fall asleep, I faded into a short nap that was actually refreshing! Usually this only happens when I’m so physically and mentally exhausted that the thoughts cannot arise with any sharpness. I hope I can repeat this, but to not grasp for the refreshing sleep can be a tricky thing when done regularly.

About the digestive issues: I realized I had significant gut health problems when I gained enough awareness to see that my stomach was tense and in discomfort almost all the time, especially after a bad sleep. My stomach has also been distended for the last few years, far beyond normal. I tried cutting out all meat and about half my usual calories to simplify digestion. Then I started following a gut health and detox protocol involving a mix of many different supplements taken regularly through the day. After doing this for the last 2-3 months, I have much less stomach discomfort and don’t feel quite as awful waking up in the morning. But still, it’s clear there is a big hump I need to pass before feeling normal. This is the hump I hope the meditation can conquer.

Thanks for the feedback. I take these all as positive things because they have given you some serious baseline data.

I tried this before going to bed last night. I stayed with the meditation for 25 minutes. Somewhere in the middle, I had that familiar sensation I’ve had during good meditation sessions, where my eyes become extremely focused on a spot slightly up between my eyes. The mind became very focused for maybe 15-30 seconds. Most of the time, however, a huge volume of thoughts were swirling so fast that I couldn’t even read their contents! It was absolute chaos in there! I had to stop before the thoughts had finished, because I was already very late for bed.

Rather than “focused”, try for “settled” instead. So, the mind settles to that point between the eyebrows (this is actually the third eye, which seems to be the mind’s natural resting point when it unravels).

At the same time, don’t TRY for this. The whole purpose of the Do Nothing meditation is that intention is dropped throughout. You don’t try to settle the mind; the mind wants to settle. You relinquish control entirely to a natural process of mental unravelling.

The racing thoughts indicate a few possibilities. The first is that this is a process that needs to finish. You don’t NEED to read their contents. In fact, intention to focus or draw meaning from thoughts is dropped in the Do Nothing meditation. Think of it as a kind of dreaming: the mind is emptying its “buffer”. It’s like a data dump. Some of the content can be insightful but the process is more important. Have faith that the mind is doing what it needs to do. This will mean starting the meditation much earlier and giving it more time to complete. It’s complete when the eyes settle on the third eye area and thoughts have wound down to virtually nothing. Typically the time taken will decrease vastly after the first few days’ sessions. So, if it needs 2 hours for the first dump, the next day it might only take 40 minutes, then 30 minutes etc. And life events or stressful interactions in the day will tend to add time to this, and this is completely normal. It is this need for a data dump that has been keeping you awake until now.

The second thing is related to the health of the body. You are probably onto something with the digestive issue. What happens is, if the body is distressed, it creates these generalized “hot” signals which the thinking mind flies to interpret in some actionable way. I am fairly convinced that many people’s erratic thoughts actually have their source in the body, incorrect diet being a strong contender. The meditation however will calm those signals in the body which in turn settles the mind. Mind and body are one in so many ways.

My advice for when mind and body are particularly “hot” like this is to bring attention to the stillness of the body. The hands are the best place to start, since they usually want to move to turn those body signals into directed action. So bring awareness to the stillness of the hands. This tends to generate a “stillness wave” which passes up into the rest of the body. The intention to Do Nothing with the hands is a powerful stillness signal. When thoughts race, bring awareness to the stillness of the hands.

It’s funny that you mention focusing above the lip rather than below the nose, because that’s what I automatically switched to after trying technique #2 for the first time. I haven’t had much success with it, however, as my concentration skills are really poor right now. Putting gentle awareness on the spot is really difficult for me, as I stray within a couple seconds.

Strong concentration on the top lip spot is not required. (In fact, that’s the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve.) You are allowed to think. It is the stillness of the body that will take you off to sleep. This is the most important signal you give yourself when going to sleep. Like with the Do Nothing meditation, it is the body stillness that induces the various rest processes. The top lip spot is just a place I have found that induces sleep rapidly if you need a place to return to.

Going to bed before finishing the ‘do nothing’ meditation may not have been the best idea. After going partly unconscious, the thoughts started up again with the same ferocity as before. I was taken through a roller coaster of sharp thoughts while half conscious, eventually triggering sleep paralysis with nightmarish high pitched noises. Fortunately, I’ve gone through this often enough that I faced it head on and let it play out. Fell asleep after this and woke up in the morning feeling my usual self – well rested in part, but definitely missing some deeper piece of sleep.

I think if you extend the time of the waking meditation then this thought buffer will be more empty and this won’t happen.

I tried the meditation again while lying in bed in the middle of the day. I hoped it would lead to a much needed refreshing nap. I didn’t do this with the intention of napping and waking up refreshed. I feel this is very important, because it leads to anxiety, like how you described anticipating pleasure while doing the no-effort meditation. Without any intention to fall asleep, I faded into a short nap that was actually refreshing! Usually this only happens when I’m so physically and mentally exhausted that the thoughts cannot arise with any sharpness. I hope I can repeat this, but to not grasp for the refreshing sleep can be a tricky thing when done regularly.

I personally get the most refreshing sleep around 7am–10am in the daylight. I believe this is an evolutionary thing for certain human subtypes. I’ve also noticed a tendency to wake up in the night and want to reflect on dreams or thoughts. Did you know the 8-hour single-chunk sleep is a relatively new cultural construct? In writings from history authors have constantly referred to a “first” and “second sleep”. The first tended towards dreams. They would then spend a couple of hours or so awake reflecting over those dreams and other thoughts before heading back down for their second sleep (which was probably the “refreshing” sleep phase). Here is the article where I first read about this.

I’m not necessarily advising that sleep pattern; I’m just bringing attention to how natural rhythms can deviate sharply from cultural prescriptions.

I prefer what the Buddhists say: Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired.

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

This is something I figured out a long time ago but forgot to write up. It is extremely simple and I’m looking forward to hearing your results.

• Push the tip of the tongue firmly against the gum behind the front two teeth. Maintain this pressure the whole time you are out, except when you need to speak.
• In especially anxious situations, breathe out through the nose in short, sharp exhales while maintaining the tongue pressure. Each exhale causes a reflexive inhale. This will dissipate anxiety very quickly when it arises.

Pushing the tongue against this area activates nerves which are part of the “positivity circuit”. These nerves being turned on is the origin of both the phrases “stiff upper lip” and “keep your chin up” (as the chin will also rise when doing this). It turns off and directly counteracts the jaw clenching which is part of the strong “negativity circuit” of anxiety and rumination. Mapping the neurological circuits, and how to activate them consciously, is a very important part of being able to consciously control your mood.

Tongue pressure against the front teeth will cause the head to rise and will improve posture dramatically. It will also tend you towards smiling, since that is on the same positivity circuit you are activating. It also keeps the top of the spine active for positive upward energy flow, whereas in the anxiety state lower spine regions (e.g. the adrenal circuit) tend to be more active.

If you find your tongue naturally favouring one “nook” to the left or right of the front two teeth, e.g. between the left and left-middle incisor or right and right-middle incisor, then let it push there instead. This is a natural correction for asymmetrical nerve activity in the face caused by myofascial winding/distortion (but do not worry about that at all while out and about). If the tongue also wants to push against the bottom front teeth at times you should also allow that.

This is insanely simple yet has dramatic, tangible positive results in an almost immediate time frame, with positivity increasing the longer the tongue pressure is applied. Please let me know how it goes!