(November 13, 2016 at 2:02 am)Astreja Wrote: I try to practice mindfulness, but not for reasons that I would call "spiritual."  Mostly it's to tidy up loose thoughts and get a more intense experience of everyday reality, not to transcend it.

Sam Harris Wrote:It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward… I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal — and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love — I love you because . . . — now made no sense at all.

The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them all… The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured. Love was — as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages — a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again?

(November 13, 2016 at 5:51 pm)operator Wrote: Honestly when I am really 'in the zone' I sort of feel high all the time. Like not intoxicated high but just feel like a really loose, relaxed, happy version of me and every moment sort of pulsates into the next. Very interesting experience and it is more easily attained when I'm meditating on a regular basis.

(November 13, 2016 at 6:37 pm)Astreja Wrote: Your description put Me in mind of alpha waves at first, but further digging around reveals that it's not as simple as that.  They've also noticed an increase in theta waves, and increased blood flow to some parts of the brain.

Meditation training does appear to have tangible neurological and psychological effects, although they're still sorting through it all.  (Trying to stage high-quality blinded studies is likely going to be an ongoing problem in researching this, simply because of differences in study subjects and the difficulty in coming up with a "placebo" form of meditation for the control group.)

Quote:the difficulty in coming up with a "placebo" form of meditation for the control group.

(November 18, 2016 at 12:33 pm)operator Wrote: And honestly {meditation} only makes sense in today's world of social media and technology to learn how to sort of slow your mind down and think more clearly. People are too wrapped up in dealing with things in their own mind to be present in the here and now.

(November 18, 2016 at 3:10 pm)Primordial Bisque Wrote: Spirituality is attained when you successfully trick yourself into believing there's something outside of reality. It's hard enough for me to even read about without felling like a whack-nut; so I just stay away. Far, far away.