
we cup mist in our hands,
as it if it were diamonds,
slipping through our fingers,
we fumble for solid ground
we cup mist in our hands,
as it if it were diamonds,
slipping through our fingers,
we fumble for solid ground
silence resting
no scales to balance
preferences forgotten
this and that have nowhere to land
when time has no place to stand
Read more on Twitter: @rubenlaukkonen
Our new paper is about the most scientifically bewildering state in meditation. If we figure this one out, it’s a goldmine for consciousness research. Possibly revealing about human hibernation, or useful for space travel. Who knows. A thread.
My interest in the possibility that one can subdue their own conscious experience began in my early 20s when I read Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Island’. A deeply insightful utopic encore to his ‘Brave New World’.
Huxley blends the best of modern technology with archaic wisdom depicted in a society living on a secluded island. There, in his personal paradise, he describes a medical procedure in place for people requiring invasive surgery.
The imagined locals of the island use a process of hypnosis in place of sedative drugs in order to release their grasp on conscious experience and allow them to be cut open without suffering (i.e., “hypnoanesthesia”).
This opened my mind to the possibility that, given the right conditions, one could intentionally undo the habit of experiencing. Like general anaesthesia, but voluntary.
Ten years later, I was meditating intensely for a few months and I underwent something very odd. A gap in my conscious experience occurred. Nothing happened but something reset in my brain… no, at the centre of my consciousness.
Everything was like brand new. Quite literally all my problems disappeared (for a while). My subjective reality was never the same. It was like waking from the longest sleep of your life after just milliseconds of absence.
Another three years later I met a friend of a friend and he told me about a meditator who can “turn off his consciousness”. He showed me a recording of a Muse headband where there was no apparent signal during the period of “cessation”:
https://www.suttavada.foundation/brainwave-research/
I was very, very sceptical. No brain activity? No way. I figured it was a malfunction with the device or it just wasn’t sensitive enough to make sense of unusual brain dynamics. It’s market device, not a scientific one.
Still, it was interesting. We decided we should at least have a conversation with the guy. We set up a zoom call. He was based in Asia at the time. Three of us scientists (two professors) spoke with him for over an hour. I may share the recording one day.
It was mind blowing. His description was just… simple, clear, and grounded. No nonsense. The guy was very convincing. Could he really just “turn off consciousness”?
It was striking that his description resonated so well with our own scientific understanding of how experience is constructed. It seemed like what you would expect if you gradually deconstructed then reconstructed the mind.
But it got even wilder. He claimed to be able to go lights-out for up to six days at a time (not risking longer in case of, you know, death). No bathroom. No food. No water. Total absence. He told us about an experience where he was meditating in a cave just before the COVID lockdowns started.
He explained how he was practicing long “cessations” there. But then one day he woke up back in his friend’s bedroom. It turned out the government had called a lockdown, so his friend had come to get him. Everyone needed be inside their houses, ASAP.
The problem was that when they found him, they couldn’t wake him up, no matter what they tried. They thought he might be dead or comatose (upon closer inspection), but when they reached out to his meditation teacher, the teacher reassured them that he was fine.
He told them to just keep him safe and warm and he’ll wake up on his own accord. He did eventually wake up, but much to his own confusion his cave had turned into a bedroom! His first thought was that he had died and moved onto the next realm.
Now to be clear we were highly skeptical, and in some ways still are. But it just wouldn’t have been honest of us as scientists not to explore this possibility a bit further. Despite the risk of lost time and resources.
What did he have to gain from lying about this? He seemed totally open to being rigorously tested. No qualms at all. I’ve seen some wild stuff on my own meditation journeys, but the other two scientists had nothing to compare this to. And yet, even they were open minded after the conversation
So I started reading everything I can about this strange meditation induced absence of consciousness. I discover that in classical Buddhism this event is called “Nirodha”, or specifically in this case, “Nirodha Samapatti”.
I discover that there’s detailed descriptions of how to enter the state, what to do before entering it, and how long to stay in order not to die. I also learned that it was distinguished from death 2300 years ago in the Maha Vedalla sutta (Nanamoli & Bodhi, 1995), as follows:
“In the case of the one who is dead, who has completed his time, his bodily, verbal and mental fabrications have ceased and subsided, his vitality is exhausted, his heat subsided, and his faculties are scattered. But in the case of a monk who has attained the cessation of perception and feeling, his bodily, verbal and mental fabrications have ceased and subsided, his vitality is not exhausted, his heat has not subsided, and his faculties are exceptionally clear.”
I discover that it’s pretty much the most advanced demonstration of contemplative talent—resembling a kind of emergent skill of enlightenment: “I have such control over experience that I can disappear myself!”
Beyond giving the practitioner immeasurable bragging rights, it also results in a powerful reset to the mind and can help the practitioner gain further insight into how the mind creates itself through ‘links of dependent origination’.
Obviously there’s a lot more to it. Like enlightenment, for example. But let’s jump over that little fire for now.
So at this point, I’m really curious. And I’m having a chinwag about it with my housemate at the time Igor. He’s also a sceptic, but overheard our Zoom conversation and also became curious. He’s an archeologist, and the first thing he said was “…man, that sounds like hibernation”.
And I’m like “nah, come on”. That can’t be right. But then again… they do go into caves to do this. And they do seem particularly good at it in the Himalayas where the winters are cold. Hmmm.
When another one of our coauthors independently brought up the idea, we started to give it some more thought. It wasn’t long ago that our common ancestors could do this, so maybe that’s where the capacity comes from? I don’t know.
Fast forward about 12 months and this mysterious meditator is at our lab in Amsterdam. He’s quiet, relaxed, and strikes me as completely ordinary. No particularly intense energy or presence, just calm and receptive. Despite the fact that…
We have a documentary crew and half a dozen scientists plus interns poking at him. After lunch, we plug him into the EEG (electroencephalography) among lots of other gadgets. We measured heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, movement (including eyes), respiration, temperature, nervous system activity, and more.
We collect a bunch of data under different conditions (including nirodha samāpatti). We do it again on the following Monday including a condition with a short nap. Is it different from sleep, we wondered?
We’re still analyzing these data. Some of the results are unremarkable. The brain definitely did not turn off (that was a relief), neither did the heart or breathing stop.
In hindsight this makes sense. Changing the bodies homeostatic balance too suddenly would be dangerous. Even hibernating animals can take days or weeks to experience changes to their physiology. But our other data is intriguing.
The preliminary data that we share in this (mostly conceptual) article, I can mention. The rest will be released later this year. I can tell you at this point that there are also other interesting results but you’ll have to be patient.
Here’s what I can tell you. Unbeknownst to us, our colleagues in the psychiatry department of Harvard lead by Dr. Matthew Sacchet were, almost around the same time, testing their own advanced meditator on a similar but slightly different capacity known as ‘fruition’.
Fruition is also often accompanied by a short cessation. They observed that alpha synchronization decreases gradually before the cessation event, dramatically peaks at cessation, and then returns to normal levels a short time after. So naturally, we thought it would be valuable to replicate their findings.
Just like them, we found a robust reduction in neural synchronization in the alpha band. The alpha band is a frequency of neural activity usually in the 10-12 hz range. It is the most dominant and resonant frequency in the brain.
Specifically, the breakdown in coherence or synchrony was highest in cessation, followed by the nap, and then the control condition. So, cessation desynchronizes neural activity in the brain, but why, and what does this mean?
In our paper, we propose that meditation begins by flattening the hierarchy of abstract processing (see our other unifying theory of meditation). Then, the cessation follows from an active (meditation induced) dis-integration of experience and hence a desynchronization of neural activity.
Desynchronizing neural activity results in a breakdown in information integration: the key mechanism that binds our experience together into a unified whole gets a mortal blow. Similar desynchronization results are found when you take enough propofol or ketamine.
Remember that all our sensory experiences reach the brain at different times and are processed in different areas of the brain. If these events are not successfully integrated it is not possible to have a coherent conscious experience. To disintegrate them is to disunify consciousness.
We suggest that this ‘unbinding’ begins at high (abstract, deep) levels such as thinking, and gradually deconstructs earlier and earlier levels of being. This interpretation seems consistent with the reports of meditators, who comment on the fundamental need to deconstruct what are called ‘the five aggregates’ in Buddhism.
These aggregates, as I understand them, simply describe the various qualities that need to come together in order to create a conscious, coherent, sense of being. Through meditation, one separates them, as well as recognises the three characteristics (impermanence, non-self, and suffering).
Thus, when the unbinding begins to touch our most axiomatic assumptions about what constitutes consciousness, it may all suddenly just come apart: the mind unbinds. And if the deconstruction (via desynchronization) is deep enough then even consciousness may no longer appear.
For now, that’s just a hypothesis. We’re also discovering new things about this unusual state every day and we have a lot of data to analyze yet. If you’re curious about the details you can check out the paper (full pdf here), where you can also read more about the hibernation idea.
This wouldn’t have been possible without all the co-authors and many others involved. Thank you to the Suttavada Foundation for their support, the ERC, and other donors. Stay tuned for the much bigger data-driven paper later in the year.
If you want (very) rare sneakpeeks from my book, chuck your email below:
when old stories whither,
an uncertain current moves in the wind…
an excitement flickers!
liminal places resemble potential
calling forth,
retracting inward,
nowhere to rest…
resting in the nowhere!
butterflies in the belly,
curiosity of the mind,
emptiness, oh emptiness,
you remind me—
that even change,
is but a dream,
carry on—
the grass continues to grow,
the kookaburra eats the scone,
the child with the wooden spoon
self consciousness roams in the deserts of eden,
a mirage of nothingness in paradise
self consciousness preserves what is human,
and sacrifices the divine
self consciousness makes borders in piles of sand, and makes things into objects,
and expands through contraction
self consciousness gives me life but blinds me to reality
self consciousness resembles a spider’s web,
a shadow of stability and comfort –
a prison in the shape of an oasis
self consciousness is a television next to a mountain stream…
self consciousness is God’s desire to dream
laughing with someone you love,
conquers time,
conquers wars,
and conquers death,
laughing with someone you love,
is diving into the ocean after rolling in mud,
is drinking ice tea in the desert,
is meeting your guru,
is timeless,
laughing with someone you love is a hair’s breadth from enlightenment
it is marvellous,
the existence of things,
especially those that live,
perhaps we marvelled ourselves into existence,
enthralled by our own genius,
we dove into a painting
untie the knot in your heart,
and remember the child that you are,
remember running wild,
just to find the best tree to climb,
or the best hill to roll down,
or the feeling of diving into water,
you still love it even now,
only you have forgotten,
the innocent scent of freedom
to pass through to love,
we must be quiet enough,
and vulnerable enough,
to hear the melody of our pain
the tender way,
is the way of fearless humility,
meeting life through the body and heart,
forgetting aboveness,
forgetting belowness,
forgetting even beyondness,
at home with things,
and people
even if you cast me out,
into a cardboard box,
a solitary cell,
or a bed with a disintegrating brain,
I will share with you my heart,
I will give my body,
in exchange for truth,
and for the light of existence,
I will take the leap over the edge,
and find the featherbed,
or bed of nails,
I do not know even a second more,
and not the least shape of things,
but I will listen to you,
dear life,
and I will fold,
like the canals,
through the city,
and I will sing my soul loudly,
just because I’m alive,
not by mistake,
but by mystery
to touch that part,
that hidden gemstone,
buried beneath worry,
buried beneath fear,
buried beneath pride,
to touch that part,
savour,
each thing,
each pulse of the senses,
each thought a treasure,
each impulse a god,
each arising a release,
and so,
what art thou?
but a masterpiece
If only I could write,
myself out of this poem,
it might ring true
serenity in being,
the simplest thing,
the nothing at our core:
the wellspring of our lore.
no tale of transcendence,
no precious awakening,
just a homage to our soul,
empty and serene
and I rejoice that we played this game,
of hide and seek,
for the storm,
it was a shower.
the fire,
it was a heater.
the pain,
it was a lover.
and my freedom,
was the sound,
of a doorbell…
from within my home
it’s okay to put the world aside,
now and then,
to remember your place,
in the garden,
never once exiled,
never once leaving home
everything being of one substance,
which is no-substance,
and seeing that every speck of dust,
is floating space,
what can we hold onto?
tell me, is there a story within you?
what does it say, about what you ought to be?
do you remember tearing those pages out of a book somewhere?
when did they turn to stone,
and become so heavy?
well, it’s good fortune then,
that you’re unable to carry…
anything at all
do we really need to prove anything at all?
come home, my dear,
there’s no shame in the simple,
the wilderness is right here
with this cage of ribs,
with this narrow mind,
with these churning thoughts,
a sharp sword through a gentle stream—
I pretend to cut the ocean,
I pretend to imprison the heart
when tomorrow,
has my heart,
today,
is a sorrow away
there is a stillness inside,
where an earthquake could not,
shake the edges of your smile
look back and it’s gone,
look forward and you’ve become an actor,
look straight ahead and assume a posture that is serenely available,
truth is total abandon to what must be,
it is courage itself,
for what is courage but a step forward into a moment without a shape?
a fish in a net is as good as dead
laying bare on granite,
the sound of the waterfall fills the entire universe,
where is there such thing as a problem?
it is wise not to love someone too much while they are still alive,
love them instead each time that they die in your arms,
eyes on eyes, hands in hands,
take moments to die together each day