Thread by @meekaale, I spent two hours this morning in the floating chamber and I [...]

I spent two hours this morning in the floating chamber and I thought I want to write a bit about meditation and what it’s like for me as someone who is far from any kind of stable mastery but has some rickety intermediate access to concentration states

I got into meditating sometime around 2009, after feeling that my mind was too chaotic, “dirty”, restless, etc. Five minutes of sitting still felt super difficult and there was no peace or calm on the horizon. Read some Buddhist instructions, etc

Years later after mediocre occasional sitting I moved to Budapest on a whim, alone, and the first evening in my Craigslist flat my excitement was replaced by anxiety and loneliness

I tried sitting for 15 minutes and came out definitely replenished and even happy—wow!

So during the months I lived there I did meditation regularly and listened to Gil Fronsdal’s audio instructions which are great

Not having internet helped for sure. Almost as good as a floating tank.

When I got home I joined a Zen center

Feels like a kinda boring life story but w/e

Sitting together was cool. We sat 3x30m, way longer than I did at home. And it was interesting to observe how sitting interacted with social anxiety. Tea after sitting was especially nice. I became a better social person

Often I would spent the first 2x30m pretty distracted and struggling to count the breaths. The last session was different, some actual relaxed concentration and peaceful states came through. Sitting through pain in knees and back was um interesting

The contrast is extreme between the outer appearance of seated meditation and the inner reality for a beginner meditator. It’s a pain in the ass literally and figuratively. I hesitate to even recommend meditation to anyone because it’s so tedious and frustrating

And the only advice you ever get, really, is “just return to the practice.”

Yeah yeah...

I was always thinking and conceptualizing how to meditate better. My teacher said this isn’t always bad. The thinking mind is useful

One concept I got mileage from was “patience.” Sitting with fundamental patience even with frustration. Patient about time passing

Another was “clarity” or “sobriety.” In meditation I tend to get obsessive and weird like desperately wanting to get to some wonderful states or fascinating mysterious insights. Then I remember, just stay clear, sober, don’t be crazy. Equanimity

In mythical terms it’s like the story of a monk in the monastery kitchen seeing a vision of Buddha appear in the steam from a pot and immediately bashing it with a ladle to make it go away

So anyway it was all pretty annoying but with definite motivating tastes of a peaceful mind, a lot like running I suppose. That kept me going. That and the desperate ambition to understand the Zen masters and attain enlightenment and feel fundamentally good and cool

I have some mystical romantic desire in my personality that resonates with strange sutras and poems and motivates me but also prevents me from always having a sober reasonable approach. I can’t say if this is good or bad

At some point I came across Daniel Ingram and his book about “hardcore meditation” and a community that says tradition-bound teachers keep their students in the dark about real meditation techniques and attainments out of some conventional mediocrity

That ringed kind of true to me in a similar way that I’ve always as an internet kid looked for hardcore truths outside conventional educational institutions so I was thrilled to find this stuff

They insisted that the different stages and states of concentration absorption described in Theravada manuals are real, attainable, and wonderful, and they recommended trying intentionally to get into those states

Nobody at the Zen center had ever really talked about these, though they did mention samadhi and peaceful concentration in general as arising naturally from zazen over time

Briefly here’s how the concentration states work in this type of Buddhist meditation, described with words like samadhi, jhana, shamatha, absorption, etc

You sit still quietly and start steering your mind’s attention toward a single direction, a target, a bit like tying your dog to a post. You develop a taste for that thing, the breath or a candle, you find curiosity and some pleasure in attending to it

It is “boring” but also in the sense of boring through, kinda tedious work but you hang on and get into it, learn to gently and soberly put everything away, knowing that fixating on this single stream of phenomena is good for you

Again like running or weightlifting, you develop a “muscle”, you find the “second breath”, you learn to see the target with more clarity, more realtime bottom-up phenomenological attention second by second

I think one crucial thing is to learn to let go of the predictive top-down processes of your mind so you can really attend to “the present moment” without anchoring in expectations, yearnings, assumptions, hopes—just see the breath in this single second and the next ad nauseum

So you develop this skill and you start to have periods of several seconds where you are with the breath quite completely, like finally being able to ride a bike without holding the handlebar, letting go of future and past, like a “goddess of victory” at the crest of reality

This is exhilarating and amazing! So you start thinking about how amazingly good you are at meditating, and suddenly you feel dirty again

But okay, you keep doing it. And then it’s just fine tuning, practicing.

Just WAITING. It’s like if your heartrate is elevated from stress, you can’t exactly just lower it through effort, you have to sit and let it happen

And so meditative concentration feels like a biological process. You encourage it, help it happen, but like a pregnancy you can’t MAKE it happen. It’s not up to you. You have to sit back and let your nervous system, your brain, actually settle down like a pool of water

Okay, so what happens if you get out of your own way while doing the concentration practice: your mind starts to actually drop away the extraneous habitual jibber jabber

Like imagine floating in a sensory deprivation chamber for an hour. You have nothing to do, nothing to plan or resolve, there’s literally no need for any cognitive activity AT ALL—but, without practice you’re going to think and worry about all kinds of shit

You might even have a full blown panic attack from thinking too much. What’s the opposite of that? What would be the optimal state in this situation?

Quiescence, calm like a still lake, vibing in a pure and unstressed way—not really thinking, not planning, not wishing, nothing

But the roadmap laid out in old Buddhist texts and verified by practitioners is quite interesting. You don’t simply reach that quiescence. There are intermediate states

In fact the road to quiescence—on which I have only ever taken the first few steps in a stumbling adolescent way—goes, seemingly necessarily, through mind states that involve BLISS pulsating through your whole sensorium

Those blissful states are called jhana. or dhyana states. There are several good books about attaining jhana as a lay practitioner: authors like Leigh Brasington, Shaila Catherine, et al

So this morning in the float chamber it took me around 1.5 hours to get to the state right BEFORE the first jhana state. I stayed there and wasn’t able to actually go into jhana, because I was too excited and out of practice

That preliminary state is called access concentration.

It means you are no longer generating arbitrary mental chatter. You have calmed down in some fundamental way.

It feels like straightening out your mind, the kitchen fan is off, you’re finally “floating”

You’re able to follow the breath with a distinguished clarity, like looking at a single candle in the darkness, with just a bare minimum of thoughts coming up, easily put aside.

You also feel some tingling pleasure

You know your body is there but in your mental world it is kind of unified and blurry. You feel a buzzy, electric, pleasant presence, maybe in your knees, finger, forehead, a bit all over. It can be hard to not get super excited and distracted by this.

This pleasure is recognized in the tradition as the gateway that leads to the next stage, which is the first jhana

Today I was indeed a bit too distracted to do what you’re supposed to do with this tingling joy. The pleasure is called “piti” in Sanskrit. You need to change your focus away from the breath now, and let this pleasure itself be your primary object of attention

You pay it attention in a way that stays level-headed but intensifies the pleasure and unifies it. You literally turn your entire experience into pure pleasure. It’s described as lathering soap into a big foam

Pure is overstating it slightly because there is some excitement and giddiness in this state that’s just natural and necessary. Experiencing this first jhana is one of the highlights of my life as a sentient being, no doubt

It’s crude but kind of accurate to call it a non-climactic orgasm that lasts for many minutes. Imagine like that head tingling toy but it makes you have almost zero thoughts or anxieties, just pure joyful pleasure with bare minimal awareness of anything else

The first times I ventured into this state I was just overwhelmed with excitement. But then you realize that you want to be able to stay level-headed in the midst of it. Bonking the Buddha on his head, like ok cool this is nice, I’m here for it, I feel it, I don’t lose my cool

And so then you settle into the second state of jhana which is where this intense “piti” pleasure recedes. The joy doesn’t go away. Kind of like a hot shower changes into a warm and lovely bath

Just hanging out in this 2nd jhana mind state feels exceptionally restorative, rejuvenating, reassuring, happy. I wish everyone could feel it every day. I haven’t felt it since, ummmm, probably 2014?

The next state is when even this refined joy becomes a bit distracting. You’re like, hmm, maybe even this positive supervibe is a bit much now, how about letting even that recede? The 3rd jhana, which I felt two or three times ever, is quiescence, peace, silence, just — relief

I’m really grateful for being able to use the floating chamber twice in a few days because it was a way to reconnect with this stuff after years of neglecting it. I remember more vividly what it was all about.

Now I ought to meditate sitting at home daily, and then maybe do a floating session every couple of weeks. It’s the same price as an hour of therapy, seems worth it

I wanted to describe my experience in more detail but I really feel like I would need graphical aids. Anyway I hope this my longest thread ever has been of some interest

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