My Personal Meditations/Thought Experiments

When I got out of the Army in 2000, I had a really tough transition. I did not fit in well with the civilian world, let's just say. For a couple of years, I couldn't hold down a job because I hated how petty and ridiculous civilians were (no offense) and I couldn't work with them. Some of the panic attacks compelled me to the emergency room, where they would hook me up an tell me that I was fine, it was all in my head.

When I couldn't pay the ER bills, I decided that if it was all just in my head, then I should be able to do something about it myself. I developed some techniques over the years to deal with it, and those techniques turned into other things.

I'll say probably the most important thing I did first was I went out and got three jobs. I took a fast food job, an auto parts delivery job, and an early morning hotel room service job. The benefit I believe I got from three jobs was not so much that it took care of the money problem a little better, but that it forced me to be in the moment, in the now, and not able to dwell on the future or the past. I was also too freaking tired to be an insomniac anymore.

I stopped drinking (not permanently, this particular time), and stopped partaking of recreational vegetation with my buddies.

My perspective on the anxiety, and the approach that I took to change it looked pretty much like the old cliche, "If you ignore it, maybe it will go away." Or however that goes... I recognized it as really an illusion my mind created out of a negative feedback loop in my mind based on regret, fear, and confusion. So I ignored it, and also the thoughts from which the feelings I had resulted.

Not to make this thing really long, I'll just say that I was doing really well with how I was tackling this problem, then something really bad happened, and I had a total relapse, ended up losing my vehicle and on the streets. My Dad told me to just come up to his house in the mountains and chill for a while and relax. I was there a year, and while I was there, I resumed my techniques. I also found one of the loves of my life, the game of poker, and also started posting here on ATS under another moniker.

My dad's a hippie, and he was always harping at me about hippie #, which I never really took too seriously, but I picked up some stuff on meditation and consciousness and read. I tried meditation, and was a little frustrated by it, I guess because I didn't know what was supposed to happen, if anything.

Damn, I'm just going off, I didn't mean to give anyone my life story, just wanted to supply someone with some of the things I do to help me relax and entertain me...

1. The Candle. This is the one I started with. Sit in a dark room with a candle. It doesn't matter what it smells like, it doesn't matter how far or how close. Just a candle, darkness, and you. Sit comfortably. Don't worry about where your hands are, but make sure your feet are flat on the ground. Look at the candle, and continue looking at. Look at it for no reason at all.

So this is just good practice. Practice makes not only you get better at something, but it also makes that something better. If you do this for 15 minutes a day for 2 weeks, and don't even bother yourself with why you're doing it, or what should happen, whatever it is for you will just happen naturally. This is the problem I had with meditation that was hard to realize. You don't meditate for a reward, you meditate for the meditation of it, and the rewards are all along the journey. You can meditate for a half hour and have three different profound feelings that change your outlook or your attitude toward something, and you didn't even ask for it or seek it. It just comes with practice.

Eventually, you don't need the candle, you can simply call up the candle in your mind and almost instantly take yourself to a place of balance, silence, and stillness. You can do it in the bathroom at work, you can do this one at a party, please don't do this one driving.

2. Sensory Perception Meditation. I will do this when I'm sitting at a poker table, folding hand after hand after hand waiting for some value. I'll also do it while driving.

I will cycle through four senses, combining taste and smell, one by one, attempting to amplify one intentionally, while subduing the rest. I'll spend four or five minutes on each one, just really trying to use each sense to the greatest extent I can while denying the others. After I've been through three or four cycles of each of the four senses, I'll try really hard to pay very close attention to all of them at once.

This is kind of a freaky one, because with practice, you tend to get pretty good at it, and you get to a point where you can willingly only focus intently on one sense organ. This comes in handy.

3. Walking with your eyes closed.

This is less of a meditation and more of a game. Do this one in a place with which you are intimately familiar, like your home, or your workplace. YES YOUR FREAKING WORKPLACE! You're so familiar with it!

Sit anywhere in the house. Don't set anything up, just leave everything as it is. Look at the walls, look at all the things in space, objects, carpet, doorways. Now close your eyes and see in your minds eye exactly what you saw with your eyeballs. Open your eyes and confirm what you see in your mind with what you see with your eyeballs. Close your eyes. Look at the room in your minds eye. Choose a destination. Walk.

Please walk slowly. Half open doors are dangerous. At first, use your hands to confirm that the object you see in your mind's eye is really where you think it is. If you feel like cheating, cheat. If you're scared, say you're scared.

With practice, and overcoming fear, and becoming confident in your abilities, you can navigate your house pretty well with the picture in your mind. I'm in a new place now, so this is fun and exciting for me again.

One might think that this ties them closer to the illusion which is matter, and while that is troublesome, I believe it actually allows one to simply interact with the illusion in a different way, and supports the idea that the illusion is of ourselves, by ourselves, and if you can imagine your surroundings close to as well as it seems to be, then maybe you can know it well enough to...

4 Thought Experiment: Sports Highlights

I'm an amateur student of physics and cosmology. I love these things. As I began to understand physics, it made me realize that the world could be looked at in very different and entertaining ways. I began to observe physics, and try to understand them intuitively, observationally.

I really despise professional sports for what they represent to me in my worldview. I'll be a football fan the moment an educator can make $120K a year starting AND still get summers off. But I digress...

I LOVE HIGHLIGHT REELS! I think it's really amazing the things that humans can do with their minds and bodies, and I like to observe that. Sports is chock full of examples of this. So when I watch highlight reels, I try really hard to conceptualize what I see occurring before me in the context of physics.

If you understand physics well enough, watch instant replays in the context of physics. SEE the forces at work. SEE the world interact with itself. Over time, amazing things are revealed. Just paying close attention to bodies of mass colliding and spinning off in different directions. Note angles of incidence, incorporate gravity...

...continued, I guess...

...with your mind's eye and practice, you can CHANGE the angles of incidence, and DISincorporate gravity if you want to.

This is great while watching X-games, and even adds a little value to stock car racing, but it totally ruins action movies.

I'm going to stop now, I might post more, there are many more.

It's a freaking blizzard here, and I'm shut in.

I think a good alternate title for this thread could be "Why People Don't Read"

3. Walking with your eyes closed.

That's one my favorites! I'm not actually blind anymore, but I still walk around the house with my eyes closed sometimes. The best part - reaching out to touch the end of the banister as I'm about to go up the stairs.

That made me smile, thank you.

reply to post by CretumOrbis


You reminded me of a very great moment in my life. I've been blessed with more than adequate eyesight, but it's now beginning to fail due to my age.

I was sitting around a table talking with three good friends who at one time couldn't see very well, but had all done Lasik surgery, and all of them could actually see better than I could.

At that point I became very grateful, because as I listened and watched these people talk about how they felt about being able to see without correction, I realize how valuable it is to be born with good eyeballs. As I watched them, I don't think I have seen three people be so genuinely happy about one thing.

Mon1k3r

I stopped drinking (not permanently, this particular time), and stopped partaking of recreational vegetation with my buddies.

Oh, the horror!

But seriously, just remember to keep and utilize to the most possible level all those things that you've learned to help control the harshness of some realities. It takes a lot to reveal intimate details of your existence and ailments that haunt you. My cat just spilled my coffee, and now I can't focus. AAARRRRGHHH

reply to post by Mon1k3r


I really like a lot of these and I have quite a few of my own that I play around with. Without turning this post into a book all I can say is flipping through different perspectives as a study can be incredibly enlightening and entertaining.

I have a couple favorite reality warping games/perspectives I play with sometimes, one of them I call the "Truman Perspective", where basically I go through the whole day with the assumption that I'm the main character in a TV show and everything I experience and witness I decode from THAT perspective. I find it entertaining because after I get settled into that perspective my mind will automatically start deducing interactions and interpreting them as "staged" but still with "meaning". By the end of the day I have some idea what that episode was about and eerily enough it makes a lot of sense when compared to my entire life...As odd as it seems I've had some pretty cool self-revelations doing this.

The second perspective is a bit trickier to do without looking like your hallucinating or laughing out of place. This perspective I call "Me, myself, and eye" Where basically every interaction I have I interpret as an interaction with a projection of one of my own thoughts, ideas, curiosities, etc. Even the objective neutral world is a SET UP like a movie set according to my mental framework. Everything I see or experience is a projection of my own mind cast there as a life experience. One of the side effects I find of doing this for a long period of time is increased synchronicity and deja vu.

I can turn these perspectives on and off at will which helps keep my sense because I think one can get LOST if they attach themselves to a perspective interpretation of reality too often.

In any case sometimes I combine and overlay these perspective games and see what comes of it. I do it when I get bored or really just want to give myself a good mind-screw!

reply to post by Sly1one


Yes, the audience effect! I think the uncertainty principle applies on larger scales, and that you will behave differently whether or not you're being observed. And the audience effect usually serves to make one do and be better than they normally would. I try to behave like a wave at all times.

I do something similar to your second one, but whenever I'm in a conversation with someone, I'll see it as when I speak to them, I'm speaking to myself, and when they're speaking to me, I'm also speaking to myself. It helps when you might be considering saying something to someone that you would rather not someone say to you! I figured that out from dreams when I realized that whenever I was having a conversation in a dream with a character or a person from my past, I was that person and I was talking to myself.

Looking at things from other people's perspective as much as possible is another good observational experiment. When disagreements happen, it's useful to be able to see from another's perspective. As a poker dealer, I'm a referee and a mediator. I have to quell uprisings and calm the natives. Being able to understand how someone feels, particularly when it involves one of their biggest attachments... money.

One thing that sometimes gets me in trouble when I'm talking with someone is speaking from a reference of a bigger picture. I like to look at things from different scales of perspective, big picture thinking. Seeing causes and effects on a large scale helps to be able to see causes unfold and extrapolate possible effects and outcomes. Being able to then incorporate different factors that will change the outcomes slightly is great for backward planning.

Thanks for thinking!

As I watched them, I don't think I have seen three people be so genuinely happy about one thing.

It's easier to see the light if you can't see the shadows.

Mon1k3r
reply to post by Sly1one

 

I do something similar to your second one, but whenever I'm in a conversation with someone, I'll see it as when I speak to them, I'm speaking to myself, and when they're speaking to me, I'm also speaking to myself. It helps when you might be considering saying something to someone that you would rather not someone say to you! I figured that out from dreams when I realized that whenever I was having a conversation in a dream with a character or a person from my past, I was that person and I was talking to myself.

Looking at things from other people's perspective as much as possible is another good observational experiment. When disagreements happen, it's useful to be able to see from another's perspective. As a poker dealer, I'm a referee and a mediator. I have to quell uprisings and calm the natives. Being able to understand how someone feels, particularly when it involves one of their biggest attachments... money.

Actually that IS also a part of "Me myself and eye". Since I'm interpreting EVERYTHING as a mental though I am literally talking to myself through other people...but I don't consider them other people, I consider them ME with a costume on. So we are doing the same thing which is awesome!

One thing that sometimes gets me in trouble when I'm talking with someone is speaking from a reference of a bigger picture. I like to look at things from different scales of perspective, big picture thinking. Seeing causes and effects on a large scale helps to be able to see causes unfold and extrapolate possible effects and outcomes. Being able to then incorporate different factors that will change the outcomes slightly is great for backward planning.

The forest or trees! I do a variation of perspective swapping that involves me holding two contradictory points of view seemingly simultaneously By swapping between the two concepts mentally at a rapid pace...This entails macro and micro perspective swapping and orientation swapping which is one of my favs. The orientation perspective is one that involves turning concepts into spinning spheres! Basically I take a concept and divide it into 3 properties. Two interchangeable poles, this is the contrasting aspects of the concept and the equator which is the balance. Mentally I will view this sphere spinning clockwise then move to the contrasting pole and view it counter-clockwise...do this rapidly enough and you get two overlay-ed paradoxical realities.

The resulting effect looks something like this:


You can control which direction the image is spinning by perspective or interpretation swapping.

reply to post by Sly1one


Thanks for that. I read your perspectology post, and it really makes simple how subjective reality is.