I doubt they truly have a clue, and they're probably just repeating some pablum they've heard, but if I may share a story. When I was in my late 20's I was meditating pretty regularly, as an atheist, and one day I was fortunate enough to experience Ego Death. I didn't know it at the time, and it was many years and lots of reading before I became confident enough to put that label on it. But, ultimately, that's what it was. Of course you could call it many other things, and many have; Bliss, Nirvana, Heaven, Oneness, Union, etc. The takeaway is, in that moment 'I' ceased to be. JoeByeThen was merely a current in the flow of the universe. Now you may be wondering why some old man is rambling on like this in regards to your question, and that's because how I experienced this moment of Oneness was through an overwhelming flood of Unconditional Love, Absolute Forgiveness, and the Understanding that the Present Moment is Inevitable, and All is as it Should be Right Now.
When I came to my senses and opened my eyes, tears were streaming down my face and I awoke much like Ebenezer Scrooge did after he had seen his own grave in the future. I burst up from my meditation position and ran for the door to tell all my friends that Everything was Okay, Everything is as Should Be. I got about as far as my hand on the doorknob to my apartment door before I realized my friends would think I had lost my mind and would have me committed.
I managed to bring myself back to that state a few more times through differing methods in the course of my studies trying to figure out what I had experienced. I never quite got to that Ultimate feeling as intense as the first time but the similarities were there. The experience changed me, definitely gave me courage, and probably even started my real journey leftward. Also, a little bit of a messiah complex.😅 Eventually the "glow" of the experience faded from my memory and doesn't come to mind as often, and yet in many ways it's still the underlying momentum behind how I live my life and strive to be a better person.
Anywho that's my piece, but one last note. You may be thinking why the fuck is some atheist telling me about God? And I would offer that atheism is the final step to understanding God. The God in your head, your relationship with God is built on a lifetime of other people telling you what God is; Thousands of years and millions of people playing telephone and politics have built an image in your head of something that's supposed to be something very few of them probably ever experienced. As tons of debatebro atheists have said, "I merely believe in one less god than you." Just a thought. Feel free to ignore me.
Coming back to this weeks later, but this was meaningful to me. I've been dealing with a lot of shame and setting unrealistic goals to try and redeem myself, but redeem myself to who? To myself? Some deeper layer?
I've had an introductory guide to meditation on my list for some years now (can't remember the title but it caught my eye in some thread because of its use in some Thai secondary schools), but haven't made time for it yet.
How did you get good at meditating?
(Sorry for rescuscitating an old thread, I really appreciate your reply!)
Oh, hi, hey. Yeah, no worries. Glad it was well received. I'm gonna ramble a bit, but bear with me.
To be clear though, I don't think I experienced ego death because I was good at meditation or anything, it was more of a perfect storm of years of a number of things. As a kid, I'd always been fascinated by hypnosis, meditation, "mind control", shit like that. I wanted to know like why people did the things they did, but then also what were we capable of. Was telepathy a thing, could we predict the future, could we control the placebo effect, etc. So because of that I'd always been very into trying all sorts of self-hypnosis tapes (yes, cassettes
) and things. I had a light machine /binaural beat maker for a few years that let me do brainwave entrainment until I got so good at seeing the lights without the machine that I'd have trouble sleeping. Like, I did acid when I was about 19 and the first time I did, despite the friends I was tripping with talking about how dangerous it was, I snuck off to do a self-hypnosis relaxation tape and in the break period it gave me to reflect on my thoughts I attempted to visualize myself breaking into a giant building and defeating the security system so I could gain access to a control panel that would let me dial down my acne. And I'd swear it worked for like a month. lol, who knows.Anyway, with all the being said, I'd always been a very inward focused kinda guy, very curious about my own thoughts, and around that time (maybe 6 months before) I had smoked week for the first time in my life. And after very much enjoying it, I did it a lot more. And what I would often do while high is tear apart my thought processes in reverse and try to recreate how I got to a certain thought. I was very much into AI and neural networks at the time ( this was like 15 years before LLMs were ever a thing), and so basically what I was trying to do was figure out how to program thoughts. I was also very heavy into prime numbers at the time, because a friend of mine had come up with a sieve and so I had created this visual representation that I would often visualize in my head over and over. like obsessively. I was a mess. But I think those things were very much a reason I experienced what I did.
- Tracing my thought process backwards all the time was basically what alchemists refer to as deconstruction.
- The prime number thing was basically a mantra of sorts, in which I was constructing something.
So, I was constantly going back and forth in my head between deconstruction and construction. Then, on top of all that, I was experimenting with a lot of self-improvement hypnosis stuff at the time because I wanted to be a more social person. I desperately wanted to change.
What I would do is I had some liberator sex couches (these big memory foam bean bag things) that were like laying on cloud. And I'd get myself nice and high, I'd put on my headphones, and then I'd lay down on my bean bag with a heavy blanket over me and then I'd drift off into the hypnosis tape. What I was basically attempting to do was create my own makeshift sensory deprivation tank of sorts. By nullifying as much of your body's sensory inputs as possible, you become much more inwardly focused. That's the point behind the stillness of seated/laying meditation techniques; To go inward as much as possible by "forgetting" your body. Plus, by raising your body temperature (with the blanket) your internal visuals become much more real, like a fever dream.
And then one day while doing it, it happened. Woke up with tears streaming down my face and kind of madness that I wanted to share with the world that everything was going to be okay. And yeah, kind of a messiah complex.😅 Which, not gonna lie, kinda scary at times.
Now hear me out, I don't necessarily think you should do any of that. What worked for me, worked for me, because of my experience, my life, my internal world. I personally think that's where organized religion goes wrong. Organized Religion is basically the square hole video, it's a single path and attempts to force everybody of different shapes through the same hole by manipulating them enough that they'll hopefully make it through.
In the months and even years that followed, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to recreate the moment, and got reasonably close multiple times with different methods. Honestly, I think it's like a drug, that first time is the best, everything after is chasing the high. But, the big thing is that after I deconstructed how I did it, I kept seeing that shit everywhere. I'd be watching cartoons and start to feel a growing frission similar to the experience. The cartoons were working me through the same emotional pattern I was trying to recreate, wtf?! I thought I was losing my shit. It was Blue car syndrome to like the nth degree. And that's when I learned about Joseph Campbell and The Hero's Journey. Something I thought I had discovered, he had figured out years before I was born, and it was like the backbone of modern day entertainment.
Learning about The Hero's Journey was kind of freeing, and really help put everything into perspective. Because now I wasn't that special. We are all the universe trying to experience ourselves and we're all taking in all these stories and experiencing internal conflict and sometimes we make it and sometimes we don't. And it was great being able to read campbell's work, of which I did a lot, and know that there was someone out there who had gotten it on the same level I had. This is one of my favorite quotes, btw:
“The Hero Path
We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known ... we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outwards we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world.” ― Joseph Campbell
Alright, I could go on and on, like how I went and lived in the woods and blah blah blah but I feel like I'm losing the plot. So here's the cw:meat and potatoes of my recommendations.
For mediation focus on making a habit every day, for five minutes or so, just sitting quietly and focusing on your breathing. If thoughts come, and there will be many, just go right back to a slow and steady, relaxing breathe. Do that for 30 days. Then bump it up another 5 minutes. 30 days, repeat until you're at like 30 minutes of just being. Get yourself one of those streak apps or something to help you keep it up. Do that for the rest of your life. Lol. I need to start up again tbh. And if that doesn't work for you, try another technique. Again, you gotta find what works for you.
Read. Read The Hero of a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, and check out all his other work if you dig it. Read stuff like Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, The Bhagavad Gita is another great one. Heck read the bible now that you've got this context of the hero's journey, read mythology. But Read. Notice how they make you feel, look for the checkpoints of the hero's journey.
and then. Use The Hero's Journey as a blueprint for your own story. Make a self insert of the ultimate person that you could imagine yourself being vs the biggest bad you can imagine. Obsessive over it. Make art for it. Make it your internal world. You don't need to tell anyone about, the important thing is it's something for you to think about. It's a framework that puts the pattern of the hero's journey into your thought process. A frame of reference for approaching the world.
Also, volunteer. Food not bombs, or something like that. The important thing is you Serve others. The final step to oneness for the hero is self-sacrifice. Sacrifice bits of your life for others by giving them your time and effort.
idk, I hope this helps? Feel free to ask questions if you want. I realize I spent way more time talking about myself than giving recommendations but I feel context is necessary and tbh, I'm still not sure how best to approach it. I've spent most of my life since that day trying to figure out how to help other people accomplish it and like idk. Everyone has their own internal world so creating a one size fits all approach is very daunting. Especially since I'm years and years away from being the guy who experienced it.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
No way, hearing your experience is definitely helpful, people have been trying to train their minds for millennia, (I'm reading a book about early monks and mental discipline now) and hearing about how you approached it recently helps put things in context of a modern day person who seems to share at least many of the same thought patterns I have. Reading about how the monks ideal form would be free of bodily sensation matches up with your use of sensory deprivation. (I really need to keep working on addressing my chronic pains, curse this earthly vessel lol)
I'm going through secondary applications for MD schools now, and have been having a lot of trouble squaring my self-effacing nature (honed through some years of depression) with the need to present myself as the best candidate possible. I've been flirting with creating a character who checks all of their boxes. I'm going to mull over the usefulness of seeing this character as the hero to my journey, somebody to be embodied, who exists not only in the fiction of my application but in the real world. (without holding my tongue about how fucked healthcare in the USA is like I have been doing in my app haha)
Anyways I'll let this be my last reply to this old thread, but may tag you for discussion in the future!
