focus-feelings-fields

My meditation seems to be proceeding to the next stage. I am now focusing on the consciousness and the space behind the consciousness. Things are moving more into non-duality as I become aware of how the consciousness which occupies my spacetime also occupies the spacetime of whatever it perceives; for example the face of my eldest child. 

I realise that this thing which I called me is actually my son George because without the object for the consciousness to rest on there is no consciousness. It is like a cloud, or a gas, or a field, always changing both shape and density.

So when there is an input like my son’s face or the sensation in an eyebrow, the field will condense on that object and this thing I used to call james will become that object, but once that object is gone it will evaporate again immediately and coalesce somewhere else, where there is an object for it to attach to.

These objects do not need to be real or external or physical. Some of them can be memories or mind objects. Thoughts and words and even imaginary people on the internet. The field largely decides where it goes and I do not control it; there is the illusion of control and I can sometimes wrestle it to somewhere, but what is doing the wrestling outside of the conditioning I am programming myself with by constantly bringing it back to condense on [x] object? This is also conditioning based on my life circumstances and the desire for liberation.

Sometimes a thing or person far away, or a projected future conversation can take hold of the field and pull and stretch it away, and in fact these projected future events are often the stickiest of them all. Something literally pulling your ‘self’ forward through time to a reality which will probably never exist, like chewing gum stuck in the hair of your consciousness.

So… yeah. I think my meditation has stepped up a gear.

I am now trying to turn this field back on itself as much as possible. It varies so much in shape and texture and viscosity and elasticity. Sometimes it vibrates and sometimes it jumps. Sometimes it super nice and silky smooth like a soft, cream-filled mochi. Sometimes it’s sticky like gum and sometimes it’s spiky like an urchin. This is all based on the input from the day and the year and indeed from the future which has not happened yet and this is all the thing that I used to call ‘me’ but which obviously is not because it cannot exist outside of this kind of extrinsic motivating factor.

This is how my meditation works now, and it seemed to change almost overnight.

This is what laid beneath the waves that I needed to settle first. I wonder what lays beneath this field. My educated guess is ‘nothingness’ (thanks, Buddha my boy) but I will need to see for myself.

Prior to this my focus was on the feelings. The more subtle bodily sensations which I attribute to dopamine and serotonin. I have done a lot of drugs, which helped me to stick these labels on, but mr chewing-gum-in-the-cosmic-hair reddit-neuroscientist (making myself laugh here) doesn’t like those labels because I don’t have a load of electrodes stuck in me brain and we can’t yet monitor phasic dopamine in a living human brain anyway so somehow absence of evidence must be evidence of absence but anyway (see what I mean about the chewing gum? this is a funny field, isn’t it?)

Anyway pulling the gum out of my hair, the field is what lay beneath the water, and before I could access it I needed to clear the water.

So now my understandings about dopamine seem so obvious they are almost trite. I am not 100% convinced about my working hypothesis for nibbana (I think I just have the elephant’s trunk), but for clearing the mind I am 100% confident that it’s about cleaning up your dopaminergic environment.

So before getting to the fields I needed to sit and work with the feelings. I needed to work with them physically initially, to raise tonic dopamine and thereby lower the impact of phasic spikes. I needed to use cycling and walking and hot baths and cold exposure and vocalisation and knife-polishing in order to get that tonic dopamine up to the point where the phasic waves would not yank my attention away like a fishhook in the cheek.

This is a case of clearing the water so that you can see the bottom. You want to go through with a net first, to scoop up all the big junk. You want to exercise and write that shit down. You want to rock and hum and sway and get yourself regulated before you sit, and then when you sit you want to focus on subtle bodily sensations as much as possible. You start with your breath as an on-ramp and then you move to your hands and the tingling dopamine electricity in the fingertips. You sit there until you get bored and then you let your attention magnetise to the next interesting sensation on your body and sit there and then the next, and so on and so forth.

You do not force your attention anywhere because that would increase the phasic spikes and be like punching the waves to try to make the water still. What you do is you allow your dopamine to lead the way and gravitate your attention to something (hopefully not a rumination, but if so, that’s also a valid object so long as you don’t dive into the whirlpool). Then once your dopamine has latched onto that you want to let it rest for a short while, and let it release. It’s like when you hold a stretch in yoga; there is a point at about 1-2 minutes in, where the muscle will just sigh and release and aaaaah there we go and you know that you did good.

That’s how it feels when you let your dopamine latch release, and that’s how you lower your phasic dopamine in meditation. You don’t force your attention to stay somewhere through will; you merely find the place that is most interesting and feed your curious mind. You magnetise it, and when it becomes boring you respect your chemicals and you move on to where they are drawn to.

Dopamine is gravity. Dopamine is what decides how our thoughts will proceed and how our muscles will twitch. If you sit, very calm, and slowly start to try to curl your finger you will notice that there is a tipping point where it activates. Not yet.. not yet… there. And then it moves a fraction of a millimetre. This is like the pressure of dopamine building along the nerves all the way to the muscle until it can get through; like the voltage overcoming the resistance in the wire to reach a critical mass and induce a motion. How’s that Mr Gum?

So before you can get onto the fields, you need to calm the feelings. But before you can calm the feelings, you need to build the focus.

This is the part that sucks. Sorry, but it does. You’ll get better fast enough, but it’s a chore. It is so worth it once you get deeper though. Try to stick it through.

This is the part where your mind is a storm and you can’t do sh!t. You should go for a ride or a walk before, for sure. But then you need to sit down and focus on your breath. You need to start coarse and work your way fine. So you count the breaths. 1, 2, all the way to 10, and back again. Did you lose count? Try again.

Or maybe stick to walking meditation and count the steps. Breathing is better once you’re calm enough. And once you have done with the counting, start trying to focus on the sensation of your breath. It does not matter where you focus on this; just find the part that most floats your boat. Breathe heavily if you need to. Ignore that stuff about mindfulness at the outset; your mind will just drift instead. You need to force it at the start I’m afraid. 

There’s hundreds of books out there about how to do this, but just find an article on the internet or a guided video and do it. 5-10 minutes a day will be enough. And as soon as fucking possible, you find those tingles in your fingers and you start thinking ‘hmmmm I wonder what these are and why do they feel so nice and will they move anywhere else in my body’ and you watch those tingles instead because man is it more enjoyable.

Anyway that’s my brain fart about meditation. Go find a real monk and get them to tell me to fuck off why don’t you :)

Laterrrr!

/jb202509302059

[stream of consciousness immediately after an evening sit]

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