Psychedelic states while meditating sober (Part 7) (Patreon)

Continued from my previous post where on my 7th day into the 10 day retreat I somehow stumbled into a trance state known in the Buddhist texts as jhāna. Actually, there are 8 of these jhānas and I found myself in the 4th one. Obviously I couldn’t be totally sure, but I followed the instructions laid out in The Path to Nibbāna and suddenly felt this warm sensation in my body rush up into my head. It was very surprising and my subjective experience of it matched very well with the description of the 4th jhāna.

After making a note of it and taking a break, I sat down to meditate again. To my surprise, I was able to traverse the same path:

(1) After sitting for a while a nice warm pleasant feeling arose in my body
(2) The sensation of that morphed slightly, then a bit later the perception of my body started to shift like some parts of it were being erased while other parts were being elongated. (Keep in mind this is very noticeable but still subtle, it’s not like a full on Ketamine trip)
(3) The sensations in my body seemed to converge and rush up into my head.

It was still quite surprising the second time around. Let me remind you I have a smile on my face the whole time I’m doing it. For some of it I am smiling naturally, but smiling is actually part of the meditation instruction. After a bit of sitting in this strange state, I noticed the smile melted off. Then I got this image of my friend who I sensed had been having a pretty hard time lately and it suddenly felt like I "put on" his suffering like a suit. I was trying to stay still to keep the meditation going but I felt all these tears welling up and my face screwing up and it pulled me out of the state. I thought in this retreat I had hit my crying quota for the year, but I guess not.

Again, a bit confused at what was happening, I cracked open The Path to Nibbāna. I flipped forward in the book and it explained that as you progress past the 4th jhana, the feeling of mettā (or “loving-kindness” - a genuine wish for others to be happy) will automatically transform into different feelings. The chapter for the 5th jhana was titled The Base of Infinite Space - Compassion. 

FYI By this point in the retreat, the frustrating back and neck pain I mentioned at the start weren’t as much of an issue. I made sure to get more walks too to keep my energy up. I think it was from Day 5 that I finally talked to a human.

“Do you need a bag?”
“No.”
“Do you have a point card?”
“No.”

...was the exciting conversation I had when buying some gummy bears. My steak and egg diet was going well, but when you first start out on a (virtually) zero carb diet, the first week or so can give you some pretty wild diarrhea while your body adapts. My meditation powers weren’t strong enough to not have my sits be interrupted by the sudden urge to go to the bathroom. Gummy bears seemed to solve the issue.

(If you're trying to shoot lasers out of your head, you're probably pushing too hard)

Later this night, things got a bit weird. Let me first point out that with the instructions for TWIM change after you hit the 4th jhana. You’re now supposed to radiate the feeling of metta (or compassion, altruistic joy or equanimity depending on what jhana you’re on) out of your head. you’re often reminded to not force things or push this feeling out of your head - if you’re generating tension in your head or forehead that’s a sign to pull back. But I didn’t know how to not generate this tension so I just rolled with it and kept going. It’s 3 months since I did this retreat so I’m a lot more familiar with this meditation technique, and it seems that things get more wacky when you push through the tension.

At some point, after going through the fourth jhana, I found myself floating in a pitch black void. I felt a rotating orb of tension on the top of my head. After a while there was a dot of tension on each of my temples and, like my head was a big can opener, they would slowly rotate horizontally so I would feel it go from my temple to my forehead, to my temple and then the back of my head. This continued for a while.

Before long I started to see some pretty weird imagery. Let me just quote what I wrote down in my notebook:
“Skull became a glass aquarium with a bunch of flying ants with a brain abdomen. Asked them what they were and they just buzzed.”
“Mothership with a Buddha on top was coming down to harvest my brain. (Got scared - thought jhanas were how insects convinced us to give them our brains.)”
“Bits of gibberish imagery and words.”
“Unable to smile here”

In my defense, my thought process was also a bit warped by the oddness of the experience. The sense of fright lasted for only a moment and the thought that jhanas were actually a tool of insect overlords to harvest our consciousness quickly passed.

Interestingly enough, I’ve had a feeling of fright similar to that before. I went to Amsterdam a couple years back and did what Terrence McKenna calls a “heroic dose” of mushrooms, which is something like 4g or more, 2-4x what people would normally take for a “fun” trip. I mistakenly took 6g. After plenty of vivid and bizarre imagery, a bit of glossolalia and the sense that my brain was no longer under my control, I got this scary thought that all the events in my life that led me to visiting Amsterdam were all a ploy by the mushrooms to get me to ingest their fruiting body and relinquish control of my brain to the mushroom overlord. However, don’t get me wrong, the jhana experience was not nearly as intense as having ingested a stupid amount of a powerful psychedelic. It was just a slightly similar thought process.

If I had to try and pin down what was going on, there was this sense in the jhana that I was viewing my mind from the 3rd person. The sense of “control” wasn’t there - it felt that things were occurring without my volition / permission. This lack of a felt understanding of myself as “being in control” was foreign enough that my mind scrambled to make sense of it and simply jumped to the most obvious conclusion: that an alien insect mothership adorned with a giant Buddha statue was coming to harvest my brain.

It was starting to blow my mind that these specific meditation instructions to focus on “loving-kindness” in order to enter a trance state … which came from writings on palm leaves made in the 1st century BCE seemed to actually work (albeit with some strange effects). It was like a scene out of that movie where Harry Potter steals the ancient Ganon tome from Bilbo Baggins’ house to summon the Dr. Strange.

On day 8, during my third sit, I found myself in a void again from afar and I had this image of the top half of my head being erased and then tons of thoughts were floating out of my head like a kid’s toy that sprays out a ton of bubbles. I could see how my thoughts arose out of a void, hovered for just a moment and then popped. Most of it was a bunch of disconnected random gibberish. I wrote in my notes: “Head erasing, stream of uncontrollable thoughts. Quick, but gibberish.” At first it was kind of impressive - I felt like I finally understood what these writings on Buddhism were talking about when they said “arise and pass away.” Thoughts just bubble up… and float away, endlessly. 

It felt like direct experience of impermanence, one of the “three characteristics” talked about in Buddhism. The three characteristics are said to describe all conscious experiences: impermanence, dissatisfaction, no-self.

Impermanence: All experienced phenomena - sensory information, thoughts, whatever - do not last.
Dissatisfaction: No (conditioned) experience can provide lasting satisfaction. You don’t get what you want, you’re not satisfied. It’s taking too long to get what you want, you’re unsatisfied. You do get what you want (maybe even what you’ve always wanted), but the satisfaction doesn’t last. In fact the more you get what you want, the less satisfied you are with getting what you want.
No-self: There is no separate, autonomous, lasting self.

In fact, if you experience impermanence then you experience dissatisfaction and no-self. Nothing lasts. Nothing lasts so nothing can provide lasting satisfaction. The sensation that there is a self was still sticking a bit for me at this point, but by seeing impermanence, you start to see that the self is just another one of these impermanent bubbles. As Mahasi Sayadaw put it: “There is no self but only mental phenomenon that arise and pass away.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1523146901574459394

What I’ve written above may sound pretty intriguing, maybe exciting but definitely “trippy.” I was watching various thoughts spray out of my head with flashes of various disconnected images and a couple sounds even random fragments of sentences in other people’s voices like “there’s ketchup” “but we still have dill.” One I remember distinctly was “no the president doesn’t stay with his brother."
After a while, I just got kind of ...bored with it. I wrote in my notes: “Quite frustrating. What do I do?”

This boredom would actually be key to progressing further.

(To be continued)