Some notes on meditation

Bonjour à tous! :-)

Donc après un peu plus d'un mois de méditation journalière, je me suis dit que j'allais écrire quelques notes sur certaines choses qui m'ont marquées dans mon expérience d'observation de la réalité et du présent... C'est évidemment seulement quelques-unes de mes expériences personelles, et je n'ai aucun doute que chacun vit des expériences différentes. Et aussi ce ne sont que des interprétations de ce que je ressens; je ne prétends pas que c'est la vérité ou quoi que ce soit (même si j'utilise "you", ça devrait être "I" je suppose)! :-) J'écris cela juste pour le fun, un peu comme des notes que l'on prend lorsque l'on fait une expérience scientifique...

C'est en anglais par contre simplement parce que je les avais notées en anglais et que ça ne me tente pas de les traduire! Mais je les partage avec vous tous quand même! :-)

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One thing which is obvious is that the brain is very good at playing tricks. I don't know if that's physiological and just the way the brain works, or if it's because of our social education which puts so much emphasis on conceptual thoughts and language as the preferred mean of understanding the world (perhaps it would have been very different a few thousand years ago).

But what I mean is that the brain is very good at evading from being still, and falling again and again into conceptual analysis of the present without me noticing it. Here's an example. When you start meditating you think about lots of things, and by observing these thoughts you see that they are all short-lived and just go away. Then come back, and go away. And after a while, that kind of wandering thoughts are just gone, and you feel like you are really observing the present, yourself, your feelings, your senses, without interpreting it, or interfering with it. And somehow when you reach that stage it feels really good, your breath slows down a lot, and there's a sort of ecstatic feeling that pops in, and you feel happy.

But then, what's funny is that instead of staying still, your brain is clever: it doesn't want to let go thoughts, and instead uses that happiness to start conceptualizing again! Before you realize it, you are thinking about how meditation is great and how it makes you feel happy, how you should do this and that about meditation, bla bla... There you go again! ;-) This just shows how good the brain is at refusing to let go, how hard it is to just observe what is, since we are so used to conceptualize everything that happens at every moment of our life...

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Another thing that I started noticing is that there seems to be various layers of thoughts, or consciousness (or subconsciousness), call it as you wish. And I'm sure the more you meditate, the deeper you go into these layers, but let me try to explain what I mean.

There is first a sort of surface layer, which basically consists of all the wandering thoughts that you have at every moment, which just come and go continuously. When you observe them without interfering, you realize that these are generally short-lived, and go away relatively easily.

Then when those are gone, you touch a sort of different layer of consciousness, which is more abstract. Somehow, you feel thoughts, you see that your brain is wandering, but you're not completely sure about what these thoughts are. It's like if you're only feeling the birth of thoughts, or a sort of pool with plenty of thoughts, but they are not clear-cut as on the surface layer. But you see that your brain is not still. As an example, when you have a song stuck in your head, I feel that it somehow lives on that second layer. When your brain has left the surface layer, you keep hearing the song in the background, in a very abstract and confused state, but you feel it is still there. You observe it, then it goes away, but comes back, always in this indistinct state. This is interesting. I suppose that there are deeper layers as well, with a lot of thoughts/past experiences that are living there in a very abstract state, and probably those influence the way your brain works, hence the way you act in your everyday life, even though you are not aware of it. But let's see. :-)

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Another thing is that I started having a few strange experiences, which are somehow a little scary when it happens. But I suppose that's part of the process; you get afraid because it's unexpected and you do not know how to react, but by observing your fear you realize it's also temporary and just go away, and you can observe reality again, without fear of the unknown.

Anyway, one of those was a few days ago. I was meditating, and then I started feeling very clearly that my back was all curved, like if I was sitting and my back was going to the right and then coming back to the left, in some sort of arc. Of course I knew that wasn't the case, but the feeling was really intense, and it kept coming back. At some point it was so intense that I opened my eyes to make sure I was sitting straight, which of course I was. But somehow, the equilibrium part of my brain seems to have been playing tricks on me, and that was weird, and slightly scary. But in the hand the fear just went away and disappeared, and the feeling of being curved as well.

Yesterday also for a little while I felt like my brain was moving to the left, in such a way that my right eye seemed to be on the right side of my brain, like if my head was extending to the left. That was also weird, although it disappeared pretty quickly.

Anyway, I don't know how these experiences take form, but one thing I realized is that when you experience something new fear seems to pop in automatically, and fear contributes to keeping your brain in this "experimental state", rather than still. Fear feeds your experience, and experience feeds your fear, in some sort of vicious circle. But then when you observe it without interfering fear just disappears again, and you can experience the unknown in a very interesting way, or the experience just disappears as well with fear.

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That's it for now! :-)