Becoming Elemental

Chestnut Ridge Park, Orchard Park, New York/Photo by Chuck Pierson

William Irwin Thompson, in his book Coming Into Being, discusses what advanced meditation can do to make your life more than what you thought it was:

Now even in the mystical experiences of stopping the heart in yogic meditation there is still a hermeneutics of the imagination. How does one interpret this experience? Say one has been in meditation for 2 hours and one has slowed down one’s metabolism to the point that the heart stops and the breath ceases, and then one feels a movement out of the body through the chakra-vortex of the third eye, … Is it the case that the heart has literally stopped? Or is it the case that now our sensitivity to time is so fine and subtle that the interval between each heart beat has become vastly extended. Like Alice going through the looking glass, or a shaman climbing a pole into another world, one has moved into a relativistic time-space. One is no longer situated in a discrete corpuscular self in which the ego holds reality together. Heart beat – gap – heartbeat. Normally, we ignore the gaps to connect heartbeat to heartbeat with a sense of continuity that we know as the ego or personality. But through meditation one reverses figure and ground and focuses on the gaps rather than the beats. The gaps are given equal time and space, and when that happens, “there goes the neighborhood”. Angels move in across the stream, and it is never going to be the boring suburbs of the ego again.

Is Thompson speculating or just using imaginative metaphors? Researchers at M.I.T. and other American universities are taking the effects of advanced mediation very seriously, suggesting it might be an important tool for optimal health.

Such capacities may also allow advanced meditators to perceive changes in natural scenes that are “hidden” from persons with “normal” attentional capacities, according to research on “change blindness,” and to enhance their visual system functioning akin to high-speed and time-lapse photography, in toto allowing for the perception, as well as sophisticated understanding, of the “moment to moment change or impermanence” universally characteristic of the phenomenal world but normally outside untrained attention and perception according to Buddhist doctrine.

Hat tip to CXB for reminding me of the quotation from William Irwin Thompson.

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