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This is a profound question but I also wonder if this non-thinking “awareness” you’re referring to is largely defined by quieting the thinking mind and listenin

This is a profound question but I also wonder if this non-thinking “awareness” you’re referring to is largely defined by quieting the thinking mind and listening to the senses more directly. A lot of meditation is about tuning out thoughts and focusing on proprioception like breathing, the feelings of the body, etc.

vjerancrnjak 3y ago
Fundamentally, this "awareness" isn't defined by quieting the thinking. It is a description of fundamental reality. No individual should be able to experience it, and the "glimpses" are just forms of brain dysfunction. Meditation techniques that focus on breath or the body are an attempt to make you do the breathing/sensing consciously. If you film yourself and later look at what you did, you'll notice you aren't breathing well when you're breathing consciously, so you're probably depriving yourself of oxygen, lowering blood concentration in certain brain regions and you hope it will be the brain region associated with conceptualizing, language etc. You can do the same with sleep. You can try to consciously fall asleep, and just like breathing, you will have a hard time because there's a reason why falling asleep is not conscious (or in other words it does not go through the regions of the brain that conceptualize). You can experience the balance center shutting down (feels like falling or turning) and you can go even deeper and feel the fear of the "ego" dying (temporarily). What remains is definitely much different than waking or dreaming state. But it is still not that "awareness/nothingness".
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I think this is entirely incorrect. Vipassana meditation, the type focused on breathing, require intense awareness of your breathing and physical body. It’s a similar state to when you intensely focus on what’s around you and everything gets brighter and more vibrant and you pick out a lot of details you normally don’t notice because you’re distracted by your thoughts. If you’re doing it the way intended you would 100% be aware of your irregular breath or pausing. In fact beginners vipassana often advises counting the breaths individually in a cycle 1..10, and resetting the count when you lose track of your breathing. You intensely focus on the sensation of the air moving through your nostrils, the muscles contracting, your clothing shifting. However it’s not about controlling your breathing, so it’s not the same as breathing consciously. It’s observing passively. Often you’ll notice that you are breathing irregularly, not because of the meditation, but because you typically are stressed and tight in your musculature due to the way you’re thinking. You can then loosen and reset your patterns of breath to be more natural, deep, and complete. A goal isn’t to stop with observing the breath though, and you work towards having a total awareness of the entire body at once, shifting your center of existence from your head to the rest of your body. You then incorporate sounds and events in your environment. This requires an intense amount of mental power, and is entirely different from your description of oxygen deprivation. Thought ceases because it interferes with being aware, not because you are experiencing brain death.
  - vjerancrnjak 3y ago
    > It’s observing passively. This is a byproduct of the process. You cannot observe passively if you still have a very strong imprint of a doer. When you start observing the tingles and the sensations, you still observe them from the center and there's a distance from the center and the sensations. The only way this center disappears is if the regions of the brain that create imprints lower their activity. I'd say it is very easy to accomplish it when you're sleepy (especially after you wake up during the night and go back to sleep). There's no need to shut anything down through high focus, brain does it naturally to paralyze the body and lose the waking state. "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor goes through many side-effects experienced by the meditators, but through a lens of a brain stroke. > Thought ceases because it interferes with being aware, not because you are experiencing brain death. Not sure about that. The verbal/visual thinking can be a strong feedback loop to the underlying unconscious processes. The only way I can see that it stops is if it is suppressed to unconscious, you've learned to not have it in focus. Also, many people have no visual and verbal thoughts. They don't have an imprint of standard modes of thinking at all. I'd say the definition of thought needs to expand to sensing. Any sensation is a thought. Focus on verbal/visual thoughts is misplaced. I do agree that people learn to eventually do this without the side effects of practice. They can probably transition to a different brain activity without dealing with the breath ever again. I think a much better standard for meditators is to ask them if they feel like their whole body is alien, or if they have something like alien hand syndrome. Losing thoughts, yet still being the body (or even the space around the body) is just another form of thoughts. The imprint of a doer gives you the feeling of someone controlling the body or doing the thinking. For example, I can get lost in thoughts so hard that I no longer have imprints of controlling the body. Somehow I leave the shower and dress myself yet I know I don't remember doing any of it. To also move the conclusion further, it sounds like the ultimate goal is to feel like you're not separate but that you're whole, so in that case it must be that this body, from that perspective, is fully without individual imprint, behaving completely like an input/output machine, no inner subjective experience present.

vjerancrnjak 3y ago

Fundamentally, this "awareness" isn't defined by quieting the thinking. It is a description of fundamental reality. No individual should be able to experience it, and the "glimpses" are just forms of brain dysfunction. Meditation techniques that focus on breath or the body are an attempt to make you do the breathing/sensing consciously. If you film yourself and later look at what you did, you'll notice you aren't breathing well when you're breathing consciously, so you're probably depriving yourself of oxygen, lowering blood concentration in certain brain regions and you hope it will be the brain region associated with conceptualizing, language etc. You can do the same with sleep. You can try to consciously fall asleep, and just like breathing, you will have a hard time because there's a reason why falling asleep is not conscious (or in other words it does not go through the regions of the brain that conceptualize). You can experience the balance center shutting down (feels like falling or turning) and you can go even deeper and feel the fear of the "ego" dying (temporarily). What remains is definitely much different than waking or dreaming state. But it is still not that "awareness/nothingness".

fnordpiglet 3y ago
I think this is entirely incorrect. Vipassana meditation, the type focused on breathing, require intense awareness of your breathing and physical body. It’s a similar state to when you intensely focus on what’s around you and everything gets brighter and more vibrant and you pick out a lot of details you normally don’t notice because you’re distracted by your thoughts. If you’re doing it the way intended you would 100% be aware of your irregular breath or pausing. In fact beginners vipassana often advises counting the breaths individually in a cycle 1..10, and resetting the count when you lose track of your breathing. You intensely focus on the sensation of the air moving through your nostrils, the muscles contracting, your clothing shifting. However it’s not about controlling your breathing, so it’s not the same as breathing consciously. It’s observing passively. Often you’ll notice that you are breathing irregularly, not because of the meditation, but because you typically are stressed and tight in your musculature due to the way you’re thinking. You can then loosen and reset your patterns of breath to be more natural, deep, and complete. A goal isn’t to stop with observing the breath though, and you work towards having a total awareness of the entire body at once, shifting your center of existence from your head to the rest of your body. You then incorporate sounds and events in your environment. This requires an intense amount of mental power, and is entirely different from your description of oxygen deprivation. Thought ceases because it interferes with being aware, not because you are experiencing brain death.
- vjerancrnjak 3y ago
  > It’s observing passively. This is a byproduct of the process. You cannot observe passively if you still have a very strong imprint of a doer. When you start observing the tingles and the sensations, you still observe them from the center and there's a distance from the center and the sensations. The only way this center disappears is if the regions of the brain that create imprints lower their activity. I'd say it is very easy to accomplish it when you're sleepy (especially after you wake up during the night and go back to sleep). There's no need to shut anything down through high focus, brain does it naturally to paralyze the body and lose the waking state. "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor goes through many side-effects experienced by the meditators, but through a lens of a brain stroke. > Thought ceases because it interferes with being aware, not because you are experiencing brain death. Not sure about that. The verbal/visual thinking can be a strong feedback loop to the underlying unconscious processes. The only way I can see that it stops is if it is suppressed to unconscious, you've learned to not have it in focus. Also, many people have no visual and verbal thoughts. They don't have an imprint of standard modes of thinking at all. I'd say the definition of thought needs to expand to sensing. Any sensation is a thought. Focus on verbal/visual thoughts is misplaced. I do agree that people learn to eventually do this without the side effects of practice. They can probably transition to a different brain activity without dealing with the breath ever again. I think a much better standard for meditators is to ask them if they feel like their whole body is alien, or if they have something like alien hand syndrome. Losing thoughts, yet still being the body (or even the space around the body) is just another form of thoughts. The imprint of a doer gives you the feeling of someone controlling the body or doing the thinking. For example, I can get lost in thoughts so hard that I no longer have imprints of controlling the body. Somehow I leave the shower and dress myself yet I know I don't remember doing any of it. To also move the conclusion further, it sounds like the ultimate goal is to feel like you're not separate but that you're whole, so in that case it must be that this body, from that perspective, is fully without individual imprint, behaving completely like an input/output machine, no inner subjective experience present.