duncancarroll

Thanks; feel free to join the group and start posting.

The Deep is sort of a 2nd plateau, the first being basically just an awareness of your mind being (very) noticeably stiller, ie "Hey, my thoughts have stopped--cool." The 1st plateau would occur usually at the 30 minute mark.

The Deep would occur a bit after that, usually at the 45-60 minute mark, occasionally sooner, and it is like the 1st plateau, only much more so--almost like if you were actually scuba diving and you had gone deep enough into the water that you could just barely see the light of the sun above you. The first plateau is characterized by stillness, but The Deep is a profound stillness, stillness to the 2nd power. It struck me, because I realized I had never experienced a stillness like this before in my life.

Body and mind are secondary and not thought of--in fact nothing whatsoever is going through my head, except the awareness of the stillness and calm. Breathing is barely perceptible, heartbeat not felt. It is a significantly refreshing experience.

The bliss seemed like a side-effect; it was nice but I wasn't trying to elicit it as much as it was generated by the calm.

Yeah, the forehead-flame was/is really bizarre. I did some Google searches for it and didn't find much of anything that didn't seem like pseudo-science (look up "Ajna chakra" and you'll see what I mean...)

It's always hard to convey to people that it was very different from a mental image / thought / feeling in that it actually feels tactile, in the same way that if you had a rock in your shoe, you wouldn't confuse it for anything else--I just don't know what this "rock" is made of; it could certainly be a creation of my mind, but it doesn't present itself that way. It's easy to ignore, so I ignore it.

Oh, I'd never heard of that--that sounds really intriguing, I'll definitely give it a try. Thanks for the reccommendation!

Hey, thanks James! Maybe an Om-themed Top Coat is in order? =D

Only because it seemed to be closely tied to entering The Deep. But of course, it's possible that reduced heartrate is an effect rather than a cause of the meditative state, so I'll certainly try it out.

It's hard to say--I definitely expected there to be more of an after-effect, so it was a little disappointing to realize that that wasn't going to happen. I think a lot of it has to do with the setting in which I live and work--big cities simply have a lot of stressors in them: noise, crowds, cars, etc., that are all triggers for me. At the time I was also managing a group of co-workers, and the responsibilities that came with it also were stressful.

I think I would have been able to persist the state longer if I lived in a suburb where I could avoid those things more readily.

I probably got a sit or two per month in after that, so I didn't stop completely, but I slowed down mainly because I got a new job that I liked and so I let myself get completely sucked into it and ended up working later hours.

I also wanted to continue to be social and that meant going out and having a beer every once in a while. Those two things really crowded out the 6-7pm time slot that I had for sitting.

I wish it were easier for me to sit in the morning, but alas. I'm hoping to restart the practice with the 2nd Annual /r/meditation sit this coming January.

Also, for anyone who's interested, we'll be doing a second "100-day challenge" over in /r/meditation beginning January 1: http://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/comments/1swxn2/the_secon...

Thanks--I will try out Yoga; other people have also told me that it has a similar effect.

It's interesting that the environment you're in could have an effect on how long it takes to get to The Deep; I believe it.

Meditating while walking sounds interesting but it also seems like it could be quite hard to control heart rate. Of course, maybe that's not as big of an issue as I make it out to be. In any case I'll have to try it sometime. Do you have a link to any further source of information about it?

Thank you. Getting to The Deep made a big difference, but it took around 30 days before I got there.

My wife was remarkably cool about it, but of course, if you read the end of the article, you can see that I didn't quite make it all the way. =) What she didn't like so much, was that between 6-7pm I was not available to help out with making dinner.

(Pardon the fact that it's a Google Doc; I haven't had time to write it into HTML yet and the Export function is not quite cutting it.)

My somewhat frustrated response to this comment thread. http://duncancarroll.tumblr.com/post/57994245946/no-really-c...

So they put human neurons into a mouse brain?

http://i.imgur.com/MZoWVEX.gif

Prob. want to use a Hulk fitted with some T2 lasers. Scordite's trading pretty high right now in Jita.

Clock at 4:20pm ಠ_ಠ

To see a post like this is both satisfying and depressing.

Satisfying because it's always good to see someone learn an important life lesson.

Depressing because I know far too many smart people with zero humility. It's such. a. shame.

Anyone else catch this in the footer:

"Please note: Codesonic concedes inferiority only to the lingering sparkle of an eroding afternoon daydream."

+1 for funny, +1 for unexpected, and +1 for capturing my imagination

Pay it forward