stillness vs witness

I’ve read a few books (meditation by OSHO, Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilber and others) that mention the importance of witnessing while meditation. This is quite effective because many times the more I try to suppress my thoughts the more thoughts arise. Sometimes, its like squirting gasoline on a flame.

Stillness seems present already when I simply witness the thoughts and emotions that arise. I let them come without aversion of clinging to them. I notice the tendency to want to add or subtract from the thoughts, but its important to just let the thought be what they are and fade away on their own.

life unwrapped and savored

In a flash it happened.

I realized… me sitting there wrapped in black skin soaking in the light of the two monitors. One computer was blasting “I want you” by Common while the other was playing “Runaway Jury”. I throw my head back with one foot resting on an old Blockbuster rental sleeve and the other in a tangle of wires. The storm of half ass projects, books, software and movies are chaos pushing in but (for no apparent reason) the panic of “too much” slips away.

I leaned my head on my hand and laugh as my life flashed before my eyes moving in and away like the blur of the city from Interstate 25. Suddenly, I wasn’t a lonely, unhappily-married, 33 year-old geek father in debt up to my earballs… stuck in every sense of the word. Suddenly, I was a free spirit just passing through. It was clear enough to allow me the savory whiff of sweet, spontaneous bliss. For that moment, I could taste my life and the flavor was like a homesick nostalgia. Like a precious souvenir that will become one of many knick-knacks on a mantle of eternal nothingness. In that moment, my love for you and my family and friends was complete because in so many unseen ways, I am looking through your eyes too and laughing like Buddha.

Then it all faded away like wind swept leaves as I started to type “In a flash it happened…”

fading in and out

I feel like I am in a dream that I can not wake up from.

There are remarkable things happening when my body is sleep but I can not participate. Or rather, part of me participates but when I “wake up” in the morning the slate is wiped clean. I forget about it and I am off to work. I am left with a feeling that I have been apart of something amazing… but the details are just out of my reach. So I’m stuck in a hazy half life where a fraction of my total life is being experience because I can’t recall the rest. Something is happening..

During the day I get so wrapped up in my work that I can’t enjoy just being alive. Before I know it, its 11pm again and I’m feeling guilty about not getting enough sleep because I know I’ll be up until 12am. And those beautiful dreams slip away again.

Something is happening even when my body is awake. In the middle of the day I get glimpses and impressions of other people’s lives. Some sad, some boring, some amazing and filled with love and lust. I wouldn’t call it psychic… its more like noise because I don’t know which are my thoughts and what are theirs. So I dissmiss it all as imagination and enjoy all the perspectives. Airports are great for this pass time. But Walmart makes me very uneasy… or maybe that is just guy in me wanting to get in and get the hell out.

I just hope that one (soon) I can shine a bright light on all of these unconscious adventures.

8-Coil Shakti - Part 5: Wearing My Body

15 Jan. 08 - 11-12am

Location of coils: Frontal Lobe
Duration: 60
Signal type: Altered States (For Beginners)
(volume 81% output)

Overview:
This is my 5th Shakti session and this time the feeling it produced was unmistakable. I felt like I was “wearing my body”. The intensity of the feeling came in waves.

Wearing My Body
I followed Todd Murphy’s advice, I updated the Shakti software to v.5g.8 and used the longer session (60min for beginners). About 5 minutes into it the session I felt some sort of subtle sinus type pressure in the center of my frontal lobe. I immediately wrote this off. But as I sit here typing, I wonder about that because I have no cold, no sniffles and no frontal feeling until I put the Shakti on. That pressure was persistent until about 45 minutes into the Altered States session when a different experience slapped me in the awareness. I laid on my bed relaxed feeling like I was wearing my body.

Now I know this will sound like an insane contradiction but I felt like a disembodied spirit wearing a body. Its was as if at any moment I could pop out and go else where. It was a very strange feeling. I’ve felt it before a few times (once after reading Osho’s book called Awareness, The Key to Living in Balance… good book). And a couple times in meditation using Robert Bruce’s “rope technique“. I have yet to have a successful OBE after having that experience with the rope technique but I definitely feel something.

So this session was great and I’m anxious to do it again.

OBE… what good it it?

Since I was a kid reading Robert Monroe’s Journey’s out of the body, I have been obsessed with out of the body experiences. Mainly because I was relieved and facinated that someone had had the same experience I’d had. Sadly, I don’t have them anymore (or at least none that I can recall).

When I was having them, I found it quite terrifying. I’d come to awareness and feel like I was floating on the ceiling or partially through the bed and floor and suddenly wake with a start only to realize… I was paralyzed. I couldn’t move my body. Like a chinese finger trap, the more I struggled the harder it was to move. Only when I relaxed was I finally able to slowly wake up my slumbering physical corpse. And when I opened my eyes I didn’t ever want to close them again for fear of being “locked in”.

I was able to conquere my fear of those other worldly experiences and eventually stop them almost completly by time the time I got to Junior High School, but by that time I’d read several books that talked about what I came to know as “sleep paralysis”, astral projection (OBE) and what you could do with these abilities. I was facinated and wanted to be able to do them again, but was never able to recreated the frequency I had when I was in elementary.

These days (’08 in my 30’s) I’m just as obsessed but even more shut out from those experiences. I have strange unexplainable experiences maybe twice per year if that.

Today as I read, Robert Bruce’s Astral Dynamics, I find my self asking what practical good is Out of the Body Experience, anyway? Don’t get me wrong. This is not me playing Aesop’s Fox and blowing the whole thing off because I am an “OBE failure”. Further, I don’t doubt that it is a real experience. The theories behind this global, cross-culture phenomenon may not agreed upon, but I personally know its real because I’ve experienced it. What IS the experience and WHY is another matter altogether.

A bigger question (for me) is, what good is it? If you can do it at will and can teach others, so what? Sure it feels good, its amazing, its exciting (and I definitely want to do it), but how can we use it to make the world a better place. I suppose you could argue that knowing that some part of the self may indeed survive death is pretty signifigant. I guess that accounts for something (I’ll mention with a shrug of my shoulders). Perhaps if everyone knew that physical reality was a mere stepping stone to another place they would behave better.

A warm fuzzy feeling is all well and good however I would submit this to you: OBE is not as important as the ability to shift to different states of consciousness. OBE seems to be only one of many grand symptoms reflecting what the human mind is capable of achieving in altered states of consciousness. Consider some of the inventions, music and discoveries achieved from altered states of consciousness:

Scientist Otto Loewi dreamed the experiment that enabled him to prove that nerve impulses are chemically transmitted, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Beethoven composed a canon in his sleep, and transcribed it after waking.
Tartini dreamed a famous violin sonata.
Robert Louis Stevenson received his stories in a twilight state of “reverie” in which benign spirits he called “brownies” helped him to compose.
William Butler Yeats wrote his celebrated one-act play Cathleen ni Houlihan from a dream, and much of his poetry flowed directly from dreams and visions.
Elias Howe, the inventor of the modern sewing machine, dreamed the solution to the technical problem that had stumped him.

— Robert Moss, Way of the Dreamer, “Two Minute History”

Others altered state creations include some of Paul McCartney’s songs, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Madame C.J. Walker (first American Woman Millionaire… who also happen to be African American) and here are many other examples.

I would take this idea a step further and suggest that our best professional athletes also experience altered states of consciousness when they are “in the zone”. Just thing of the possessed demon that wore #27 in the Chicago Bulls. Micheal Jordan’s enlightenment was a tongue out slam dunk in a 27 point game. Consider Lance Armstrong state of mind while he won his SIXTH tour de France after kicking cancers NATURAL BLACK ASS. Is it a stretch to believe that the greatest among us are capable of reaching the far reaches of human mind by accessing shamanistic states of bliss with amazing feats of focus.

I would also mention some of histories great porn stars, but I guess that would make everything I just a big joke to some. But consider it.. your best sexual performance probably included your most amazing state of mental, emotional physical focus… you were in the zone and the pay off is something you’d repeat every day if you could.

8-Coil Shakti - Part 4: Nada on Hippocampus

10 Jan. 08 - 11-12am (20min then fell asleep)

Location of coils: Temporal Lobe
Duration: (?)
Signal type: Hippocampus signals 40Hz Alternating Modulated (fast alteration)
(volume increased to 86% output)

Overview:
Did feel anything. I think I’ll switch to the Amygdala signal.

Nothing at all to report.

8-Coil Shakti - Part 3: Brain Reboot?

7 Jan. 08 - 12-1am (? - fell asleep)

Location of coils: Temporal Lobe
Duration: (?)
Signal type: Hippocampus signals 40Hz Alternating Modulated (fast alteration)
(volume increased to 86% output)

Overview:
This was my second session with the Shakti 8-coil device. Once AGAIN, I fell asleep. But unlike the last time I woke up feeling… above average mental clarity. I don’t recall any odd dreams but I felt very well rested almost like my brain had been rebooted.

Brain Reboot
If you’ve ever dealt with a Windows operating system (particularly PRE-XP), you’ll know that every now and then the system needs to be rebooted. That is completely shutting off the computer and turning it back on. If those legacy Windows system are not shut off every now and then you are in for a smorgusborg of delicious errors, hang time and lossed data for no damn “blue screen of death” reason. Well, that is was I felt like happen to me. I felt like my brain had been loaded with a bloated ineffecient Microsoft product that had been running without a reboot for about two months too long. I felt (perhaps unreasonably so) like my brain could calculate anything. Mentally, on that day was like the skinny guy that works out for two weeks into a New Years resolution, gets a pump and starts to puff his chest out in front of the babes!

I believe the Shakti had something to do with it, but not totally conviced yet. So I will mark this session as “Do Over”.

8-Coil Shakti - Part 2: Shakti Do Over

4 Jan. 08 - 12-1am (? - fell asleep)

Location of coils: Temporal Lobe
Duration: (?)
Signal type: Hippocampus signals 40Hz Alternating Modulated (fast alteration)
(volume increased to 86% output)

Overview:
I consider this a tainted session since it was conducted while I was completely exhausted. I was literally falling asleep as I was figuring the system out.

Initial Sensation:
I anticipated the initial sensation that I’ve read others experience after only a few seconds or minutes of Shakti activiatation:

“I did feel a sensation of expansion and peacefulness in my heart only seconds after I put the (hippocampal) signal on. … It felt like I was taking a contraction out of my brain. I am looking forward to taking out more of this contracted state…” — shakti technology testimonials

I was hesitant even to put the device over my head for fear of being catapulted into an experience that would topple my little world like a house of cards in the middle of Chicago. I was in my computer room feeling like Neo about to take the “Red Pill” with Todd Murphy (this devices inventor) as a real life Morpheus about to eject me out of the Matrix for good (I’ve got a pretty awesome imagination).

Alas, I had no such luck. I didn’t feel anything. I put the device on, configured it for Hippocampus signal over the temporal lobe and felt nothing for about 10 minutes while I laid in my pitch black room. The next thing I new it was morning. The alarm clock was blasting and the Shakti tentacles were tossed haphazardly to the side of the bed.

Conclusion:
I think I was just too tired. The instructions indicate that you should wait for 36 hours before staping in again. I don’t normally follow instructions, but in this case I’ve decided to play it safe. In the middle of the day, 5 Jan 08, I had strange ache in my right temporal lobe. Its strange because I don’t normally get such localized headaches on that side of my head. I may have been dehydrated. I decided to count this session as a do over.

Dean Radin: Why I’m not a Skeptic

Why I’m not a skeptic

No, not why I’m not skeptical, or critical-minded, because those traits are essential in science. Rather, I don’t consider myself a “skeptic,” as in a card-carrying member of a skeptical society, because most (not all) of the people I know who belong to such societies are loud, arrogant, angry, and cynical. I prefer to spend time with people who are quiet, humble, calm and hopeful.

This came to mind after reading one of Steven Novella’s blogs. In it he parrots skeptical mantras that are known to be wrong. I won’t bother to address them here because they are addressed in detail in Entangled Minds. But I will respond to two comments —> More at Radin’s Blog

I’ve got his book Entagled Minds and can’t wait to read it.

8-Coil Shakti - Part 1: Intro

I’ve been real excited about Persinger’s and Todd Murphy’s research. Persinger is a cognitive neuroscientist who has been doing research on the effects of magnetic fields on the human brian. Todd Murphy is an interesting character. He is a Buddhist theologian turned researching behavioral scientist. Both are gathering data on the affects of magnetic fields on the brain. Specific magnetic fields applied to different areas of the brain produce various states of consciousness. I’m not sure what it means to science or spirituality but I’m anxious to find out.

So far neo-atheist have been using Persinger’s research as proof that all mystical experiences are not real because they can be produced. Surprisingly, Persinger does not feel this way. He has in fact tested psychically talented people to see the affects of magnetic fields on them.

Todd Murphy created what he calls the 8-coil Shakti based on Persinger’s research. The 8-coil Shakti is an affordable, homemade device that sends weak magnetic fields into the brain to produce similar experiences… though the technology is different from what Persinger uses.

I decided to get one and test it out.

Intergral Persinger:
He organized the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Laurentian University, which became one of the first to integrate chemistry, biology and psychology. — wiki

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