15) Deepen your awakening practices – neuroscientifically
Research demonstrates that whatever “enlightenment” approach we take - Eastern, Western, religious, secular - the frontal and parietal lobes are critical. Deactivating two centers in these regions in the Default Mode Network (DMN), generates the mystical experiences of “All is One” and “now, now, now”.
Research demonstrates that whatever “enlightenment” approach we take - Eastern, Western, religious, secular - the frontal and parietal lobes are critical. Deactivating two centers in these regions in the Default Mode Network (DMN), generates the mystical experiences of “All is One” and “now, now, now”.
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DMN key centers:
Frontal (MPFC) and Parietal (PCC) |
Two enlightenment experiences:
a) aha(s), or "e"s, that feel good and produce insights
b) "E"s that produce fundamental behavior and belief change
Typically, brain activity doesn’t change more than “5 to 10 percent throughout the day”.
However, spiritual practices increase frontal lobe activity, producing clarity and the feeling of "control" and "purpose". Increases in parietal lobe activity increase awareness of self/I in relation to objects, and movement toward a goal.
These increases can be > 20% before practice ends and you feel alert and peaceful, but no "e" or “E" manifests as activity returns to "baseline".
On the other hand, an unexpected dramatic change from + 20% above baseline, to - 20% below baseline (40% shift), is overwhelming - total surrender results in an "E" w/"All is One", and "Now, now, now" experiences w/fundamental changes in beliefs and behaviors. Larger total changes produce longer and stronger "E"s.
Many approaches that generate these 40% changes. This typically involves a complex practice with activities which engage motor, sensory, temporal, etc., regions simultaneously. This causes an “overload” and deafferentation - a sudden loss of input to the frontal and parietal cortexes, triggering “E"s.
Sufis, whose Dhikr/Zhikr involves powerful chanting, head rocking, hand clapping and/or drumming and/or whirling. Deafferentation occurs and "E"s result w/“extraordinarily real” states of "One with everything" and opening “one’s heart to a direct experience of God’s love”, lasting hours or days. (Magic mushroom and dancing with high energy music?)
Greater decreases occurred in right prefrontal cortex activity where negative thinking, pessimism and worry arise, than in the left prefrontal cortex where clarity and optimism originate. This asymmetry generates joy and bliss arising from meditation or other practices. (Weng, et al. Psychol Sci., 2013)
Barbara Fredickson and others showed that every negative feeling/thought/story needs to be offset by at least three positive ones to maintain optimism. If it is < 3/1, you’re likely to be depressed. (Positivity, 2009).
The difference between doing a practice "habitually" and doing it with intention and concentration:
Nonduality's equivalent is more complex - In different traditions, decreases in parietal lobe activity were observed in advanced meditators after “about fifty or sixty minutes” when they "merged" with their object. Buddhists described "being one with pure consciousness”/ Franciscan nuns “felt a sense of unity and connected with Jesus and God”.
a) aha(s), or "e"s, that feel good and produce insights
b) "E"s that produce fundamental behavior and belief change
Typically, brain activity doesn’t change more than “5 to 10 percent throughout the day”.
However, spiritual practices increase frontal lobe activity, producing clarity and the feeling of "control" and "purpose". Increases in parietal lobe activity increase awareness of self/I in relation to objects, and movement toward a goal.
These increases can be > 20% before practice ends and you feel alert and peaceful, but no "e" or “E" manifests as activity returns to "baseline".
On the other hand, an unexpected dramatic change from + 20% above baseline, to - 20% below baseline (40% shift), is overwhelming - total surrender results in an "E" w/"All is One", and "Now, now, now" experiences w/fundamental changes in beliefs and behaviors. Larger total changes produce longer and stronger "E"s.
Many approaches that generate these 40% changes. This typically involves a complex practice with activities which engage motor, sensory, temporal, etc., regions simultaneously. This causes an “overload” and deafferentation - a sudden loss of input to the frontal and parietal cortexes, triggering “E"s.
Sufis, whose Dhikr/Zhikr involves powerful chanting, head rocking, hand clapping and/or drumming and/or whirling. Deafferentation occurs and "E"s result w/“extraordinarily real” states of "One with everything" and opening “one’s heart to a direct experience of God’s love”, lasting hours or days. (Magic mushroom and dancing with high energy music?)
Greater decreases occurred in right prefrontal cortex activity where negative thinking, pessimism and worry arise, than in the left prefrontal cortex where clarity and optimism originate. This asymmetry generates joy and bliss arising from meditation or other practices. (Weng, et al. Psychol Sci., 2013)
Barbara Fredickson and others showed that every negative feeling/thought/story needs to be offset by at least three positive ones to maintain optimism. If it is < 3/1, you’re likely to be depressed. (Positivity, 2009).
The difference between doing a practice "habitually" and doing it with intention and concentration:
- Doing practice habitually produced no increase in frontal lobe activity different from any other habitual routine. (memory and cognitive impairment produced "positive changes in mood, anxiety, and other neuropsychological parameters...correlated with changes in cerebral blood flow".)
- Doing practice slowly, with intention, focusing on every word and movement, produced significant decreases in frontal lobe activity and increased activity in the brain’s dopamine reward system, creating “great joy” and a deep surrendering to God. (Practice intensity increases produced increases in frontal and parietal regions, followed by significant decreases (the 40% shift), producing increased oneness and connectedness.)
Nonduality's equivalent is more complex - In different traditions, decreases in parietal lobe activity were observed in advanced meditators after “about fifty or sixty minutes” when they "merged" with their object. Buddhists described "being one with pure consciousness”/ Franciscan nuns “felt a sense of unity and connected with Jesus and God”.
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Franciscan nuns SPECT scans Baseline vs Prayer |
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Tibetan Buddhist meditators SPECT scans Baseline vs Meditation |
Advanced meditation practitioners also had significant, long-term functional changes in the thalamus, which builds “reality models of the world”.
"The more frequently a person engages in meditative self-reflection, the more these reality centers change”. Colors were more vibrant, folk more empathetic, experiences more pleasurable and intense.
Takeaways:
1) Complex practices with activities engaging different brain regions simultaneously can produce enlightenment experiences and improve memory and cognition.
2) If your practice has become habitual, stale, lifeless, w/o bliss, you're not "done", you're stuck. Go further. As the Ribhu Gita says "anandam param manam" - bliss is the primary measure.
With self-inquiry, change questions, try negations/affirmations. With yoga, add breath focus, negations, "not this", and "yes". Watching the breath, see where it comes from/goes to, when/where it goes from exhale to inhale. If chanting, add mudras. The more engaged you are, the more effective practice will be.
3) To produce enlightenment experiences, practices must significantly increase activation of the frontal and parietal cortexes well over baseline, and then have a decreased activation to, or, well below baseline. The larger the total change, the longer, stronger, and deeper the experience will be.
Sources:
"The more frequently a person engages in meditative self-reflection, the more these reality centers change”. Colors were more vibrant, folk more empathetic, experiences more pleasurable and intense.
Takeaways:
1) Complex practices with activities engaging different brain regions simultaneously can produce enlightenment experiences and improve memory and cognition.
2) If your practice has become habitual, stale, lifeless, w/o bliss, you're not "done", you're stuck. Go further. As the Ribhu Gita says "anandam param manam" - bliss is the primary measure.
With self-inquiry, change questions, try negations/affirmations. With yoga, add breath focus, negations, "not this", and "yes". Watching the breath, see where it comes from/goes to, when/where it goes from exhale to inhale. If chanting, add mudras. The more engaged you are, the more effective practice will be.
3) To produce enlightenment experiences, practices must significantly increase activation of the frontal and parietal cortexes well over baseline, and then have a decreased activation to, or, well below baseline. The larger the total change, the longer, stronger, and deeper the experience will be.
Sources:
A Dialogue
A "complete breath" would use all three, the sequential order, top to bottom or bottom to top, changing depending on what activity was being engaged in, which is described in detail in Happiness Beyond Thought. In meditation, the breath is typically arising only from the belly, the depth decreasing as one gets more and more still.
It can be very helpful to actively, and consciously, lie down and place our hands on your belly, ribs, and shoulders as you inhale and exhale using each of those areas to see what you aren't engaging fully.
But I'm a bit worried that this pushes us towards an "extreme dualist" position. These experiences are "just" sub-routines that small parts of your brain can run with the appropriate encouragement. It's all just chemical and electrical activity. Just because one can experience non-duality doesn't mean that at the bottom reality *is* non-dual.
It's all consistent of course with a non-dual model where duality arises out of non-duality. But if one can eventually easily trigger such "E"s - it says nothing much about reality. Just about our growing knowledge.
Well, if "reality" was only dualistic, then we would never be able to experience "nonduality", even for a short time. All of our experiences, however short, or originating from a few, or many, regions of the brain, would all be dual.
Psychedelic experiences, similarly, would only be dual, and there would be no spaces between thoughts, no stillness when one first awakens in the morning before "the day starts". Mystical experiences wouldn't be consistently reported as "more real" than "reality".
So there must be nonduality, but which is the "real" reality.
Re the "nondual" practices also being (initially) dualistic, yes, that is where we start from, given our heavy conditioning and (very recent) evolution to that bias. Challenging that presumption seems ridiculous.
However, if we just being investigating the source of the duality, the subject "I", it begins to weaken, fight back, create stories about why this is a problem, bring up old fears and suffering, etc. If we persist in that careful investigation into what/when/where this "I" is, it amazingly begins to fragment.
If reality was dualistic, questioning its source would be futile, but it quickly brings the perception of nonduality. This isn't just "growing knowledge", but decreasing our conditioning and modifying the current OS.
Even more interesting, as we deconstruct this "I", our bodies and lives function better without it. The ongoing, consistent perception is of a nondual, Oneness, and of living only in the present, instead of in the unreality of the remembered past and projected future.
Thanks Gary, I can only imagine this state at this point, maybe one day! At your level do you have any fear of death left?
As this work deconstructs the "I" that is the creator of the illusion that we are this body, then the passing of the body is not a problem. What remains after that illusion falls away is what has always been there and will always be there, this Deep, Vast, Sweet, Stillness which is far beyond anything experienced through this body.
A "complete breath" would use all three, the sequential order, top to bottom or bottom to top, changing depending on what activity was being engaged in, which is described in detail in Happiness Beyond Thought. In meditation, the breath is typically arising only from the belly, the depth decreasing as one gets more and more still.
It can be very helpful to actively, and consciously, lie down and place our hands on your belly, ribs, and shoulders as you inhale and exhale using each of those areas to see what you aren't engaging fully.
But I'm a bit worried that this pushes us towards an "extreme dualist" position. These experiences are "just" sub-routines that small parts of your brain can run with the appropriate encouragement. It's all just chemical and electrical activity. Just because one can experience non-duality doesn't mean that at the bottom reality *is* non-dual.
It's all consistent of course with a non-dual model where duality arises out of non-duality. But if one can eventually easily trigger such "E"s - it says nothing much about reality. Just about our growing knowledge.
Well, if "reality" was only dualistic, then we would never be able to experience "nonduality", even for a short time. All of our experiences, however short, or originating from a few, or many, regions of the brain, would all be dual.
Psychedelic experiences, similarly, would only be dual, and there would be no spaces between thoughts, no stillness when one first awakens in the morning before "the day starts". Mystical experiences wouldn't be consistently reported as "more real" than "reality".
So there must be nonduality, but which is the "real" reality.
Re the "nondual" practices also being (initially) dualistic, yes, that is where we start from, given our heavy conditioning and (very recent) evolution to that bias. Challenging that presumption seems ridiculous.
However, if we just being investigating the source of the duality, the subject "I", it begins to weaken, fight back, create stories about why this is a problem, bring up old fears and suffering, etc. If we persist in that careful investigation into what/when/where this "I" is, it amazingly begins to fragment.
If reality was dualistic, questioning its source would be futile, but it quickly brings the perception of nonduality. This isn't just "growing knowledge", but decreasing our conditioning and modifying the current OS.
Even more interesting, as we deconstruct this "I", our bodies and lives function better without it. The ongoing, consistent perception is of a nondual, Oneness, and of living only in the present, instead of in the unreality of the remembered past and projected future.
Thanks Gary, I can only imagine this state at this point, maybe one day! At your level do you have any fear of death left?
As this work deconstructs the "I" that is the creator of the illusion that we are this body, then the passing of the body is not a problem. What remains after that illusion falls away is what has always been there and will always be there, this Deep, Vast, Sweet, Stillness which is far beyond anything experienced through this body.