Psychonaut diaries
Psychonaut is from the ancient greek psychē ‘soul, spirit, mind' and naútēs ‘sailor, navigator’. Sailing in the ocean of mind-spirit is my…
Psychonaut is from the ancient greek psychē ‘soul, spirit, mind' and naútēs ‘sailor, navigator’. Sailing in the ocean of mind-spirit is my passion and a big part of my life. My ship of choice is meditation. Having meditated for about three years, I have decided to write down some of the techniques, findings, and experiences that I have found through the practice and study. I hope, dear reader, these notes will help guide your own mediation or ignite curiosity for exploring the ocean of mind. This text is an opening. It will introduce what I plan to write about by giving an overview of my practice, signposting the landscape of topics. I will be writing on a semi-regular basis, aiming for once a month or more, choosing topics in no particular order.
Every meditation practice has a base — where you start, the path — the actual practice, and the fruit — where you arrive. When I started I had two simple goals: to learn to control my attention and to improve my psychological well-being. After getting some of the first fruits, I started being motivated more and more by curiosity and drive to explore. New paths were opening up and I took a few side roads. Looking back at my practice now, I can see four major paths:
Mastering your attention
Working through your conditioning
Exploring of experiential landscape
Changing your view of reality through insight
From one point of view, these are separate journeys, but from a different angle they overlay and feed into each other like streams of a mountain river.
Zen master Ikkyu, the legend has it, when asked to write down the words of highest wisdom, wrote “attention”. When asked to elaborate, he repeated it three times — “attention, attention, attention”. To explore a terrain, one needs to be able to move. To skillfully move your mind, you have to master your attention. The core skill of keeping attention fixed or open, relaxed or tight, smooth or sharp is the fruit of this path and the base of everything else. Skilful attention always requires skillful emotions. To be focused, one has to be fully sensitive to their emotions, yet not responding to them reactively. In fact, I found that attention and emotions can not be separated. They are different views on the same phenomena. My notes in this area will mostly focus on the relation between attention and emotions, both on and off the meditation bench.
Once a certain level of concentration is available other paths get unlocked. In this way, good concentration provides a base camp. Being able to work with your conditioning is one of those new paths. Adult human beings come with a hefty bag of accumulated conditioning. Infancy layered over childhood layered over adolescence layered over adulthood… Like layers of paint and wallpaper in an old house. Each layer is unprocessed emotional energy from salient life events that gets stored in psyche as affective reactions. You might hate ice cream shops because you got dumped in one when you were 16. Some of that conditioning can be functional (serve a purpose), a lot of it is pure burden. Even functional conditioning often raises negative emotions like fear or anger. States of high concentration allow a meditator to work with that conditioning in an important new way. One can engage with it while concentrated and release the stored energy. Dissolving layers of conditioning makes the life easier and more enjoyable. It also increases concentration as the meditator is less distracted by reactive emotions jerking their attention. This in turn allows for more efficient and deeper dissolution of conditioning in a virtuous cycle. I plan to describe my most tried and true techniques to work with conditioning.
Concentration allows the meditator to access some very special states of mind. One of the most exciting psychonautical path is the exploration of the landscape of these states. In Tibetan Nyingma school they are called nyams. Meditators from different traditions might recognise some of them: Jhannas, Fire Kasina or ne-pa and gyo-wa. Mapping out that landscape, finding similarities and connections, discovering and exploring is pure joy and great motivation for me. Some of these nyams are like psychedelic experiences, while others feel extremely sober and normal, almost the extreme end of sobriety. I plan to share my psychonautical maps, navigation tools and sailing techniques. These topics will be quite technical and will be mostly interesting for meditators with right concentration available.
“We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view”
Bob Dylan
The last path is the most spiritually oriented. Nyams radically, but temporarily change meditator’s experience. This path is concerned with transformation of the baseline “normal” experience. The goal is to change the view of the world. View is how we interpret the world as it is happening to us. It is impossible not to have a view, unless one is in deep sleep, unconscious or dead. It is possible though to have very different views on the same happening of the world. Some views open up freedom and reduce suffering, others make the world magical and mystical or enable compassion and connection with others. “Seeing that Frees” by Rob Burbea is a great book aimed squarely at the topic of transforming the views. On this path concentration and experience are important as much as intellectual understanding. The experience of shifting one’s view is called insight. Insights happen when intellectual understanding and experience click together.
Switching between views is a bit like making the woman in the gif spin the other way. Are you thinking your thoughts or do your thoughts think you? Can you switch back and forth? Rather than finding the one true, correct view the game is to be flexible and fluid with your view. What you are looking for is a dance, where the view moves congruently with the world. I’m also interested in making connections between meditative exploration of views, Buddhist and Tao philosophy and modern thinkers like Karen Barad and Manuel DeLanda. I might also occasionally explore connections with my day job, which is AI and neuroscience.
So, welcome to my psychonaut diaries.