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Comment by monktastic1 | Hacker News Reader

"...when they were deeply asleep and therefore unconscious."

Advanced meditators are able to be vividly conscious in deep sleep. Though it's probably impossible to describe, the closest might be "consciousness without content." It's subtle enough that most of us overlook it.

Even something as common as lucid dreaming took centuries to be taken seriously. The community at large insisted that it was a delusion. We are probably years away from being able to make sense of the claim that we can be profoundly conscious in deep sleep. Perhaps that can only happen when more of us are trained well enough to experience it for ourselves.

I'll be eager to see how society integrates these kinds of understandings into end-of-life issues, if I'm still around.

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> Advanced meditators are able to be vividly conscious in dep sleep.

How can that be known except through self-reporting? At least with lucid dreaming, experiments have shown communication from the subject via eye signals[1]. Has a similar thing being done with meditators?

[1] http://www.historydisclosure.com/scientific-experiment-prove...

Great question. I'm not sure the mind has control of the body in that state. But there's an even more fundamental problem: intention is a form of content, so one would by definition be out of the state by expressing intention.

I'm sure to some this sounds bogus or like a cop-out. But experiencing it (or similar states, as can happen with psychedelics) can impact our waking lives in meaningful ways, so I hope it's not brushed under the rug for much longer.

> How can that be known except through self-reporting?

If meditators remember it then it probably has physical manifestation in whatever mechanisms brains use to remember stuff. Maybe some day it will be possible to observe this being stored in the brain.

I have discussed these techniques with a monk who went trough the Tibetan 3 year, 3 month, 3 days retreat.

Their lucid dreaming techniques is basically similar as how non-mediators train to do it and the training happens towards the end of the several year long isolated retreat. The only difference is the extensive amount of preparation. For example, when you learn to sleep in sitting posture (in a wooden box that supports the posture) sleep becomes naturally more light.

Even then, being able to keep lucid dream constantly is not necessarily easy and the ability do it can disappear quickly. The guy I talked with said that while he learned to wake into lucid dreaming in most nights, he never learned to fall asleep while conscious.

ps. It's interesting how many classical Buddhist 'psycic abilities' can be explained by yogis training in lucid dreaming states. Walking trough walls is classical ability described in Buddhist texts and that's one thing they trained during lucid dreaming.

> It's interesting how many classical Buddhist 'psycic abilities' can be explained by yogis training in lucid dreaming states. Walking trough walls is classical ability described in Buddhist texts and that's one thing they trained during lucid dreaming.

I don't think I see your connection - walking through walls was seemingly possible because yogis dreamed they could do it?

Yes. You can learn to walk trough walls during lucid dreaming and break all physics while dreaming. Then you read from the sutra or hear that some monks long time ago was so advanced that he could do it in real life. It's not so hard to jump into conclusions. Lucid dreaming itself is kind of magic virtual reality.

> Even something as common as lucid dreaming took centuries to be taken seriously.

Umm, what? It was a common belief in bronze-age Greek society; is referred to in the Torah/Old Testament (Pharao's dreams) and of course is a fundamental belief of a number of Australia's aboriginal cultures. I would be shocked if it were not fundamental in many many other cultures (east Asia, the Americas etc) as well. It's not like the experience is not widespread.

What techniques does this involve?

Various traditions have their own systems of meditation. But broadly speaking, sitting practice involves not interfering with the contents of consciousness, while still being vividly awake to them. Then something we might call "the sheer fact of consciousness" becomes more salient, first during meditation sessions, then even in the midst of Times Square, and later even in sleep. Normally, we have such a tight association with the particulars of conscious experience that we cannot help but overlook the primary sense of being common to all of them.

I'm sorry if this all sounds like mystical mumbo-jumbo. Language is admittedly a big barrier here.

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